


human wants

by nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-05-18 10:14:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 257,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare/pseuds/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare
Summary: short summary: a vampire au ft. vamp shion and human nezlong summary: Shion is a vampire in a world where vampires went from respected citizens to vicious criminals overnight after a great massacre in which hundreds of rogue vampires slaughtered thousands of humans. Vamps were outcasted and hunted down, and the few that are left, like Shion, are starving. Shion disguises himself as a human in order to live as normal a life as he can, but he is careful to keep a certain distance between himself and the rest of the world that wants him dead.Until he meets Nezumi.





	1. Chapter 1

Of course, vampires had not been accepted in society since the Great Slaughter two decades before, so Shion used brown hair dye and brown contacts. For his scar, he applied foundation. His skin color, according to the company whose foundation he used, was _Warm Silk,_ a shade lighter than _Cashew_ , _Honey,_ and _Natural Sand,_ but darker than _Porcelain, Ivory,_ and _Pearl._ Shion had tried all of these foundation shades, and several more, before finding that he was closest to _Warm Silk._ He couldn’t chance the wrong shade. He couldn’t risk being discovered.

            He was undressed and applying his morning coat of _Warm Silk_ – he would have to reapply at noon during his midday break between the courses he taught at the University of Tokyo – in his apartment bathroom when his phone vibrated on the sink counter, buzzing with the vibration. The lit screen revealed Safu’s name, and Shion used his pinky – the only finger free of _Warm Silk_ – to answer the call and put it on speaker before resuming his foundation application. He was on the hollow of his stomach now, rubbing his foundation-coated fingertips over the bones of his ribs, which jutted out of his thin skin to reveal his malnourishment.

             “Hey, Safu, what’s up?”

             “Are you alone?”

             “Yeah, applying foundation.” Shion dipped his fingers in the small plate he filled with foundation, finding it a less messy method than having to squeeze the bottle each time he needed more.

             “I found an online blood bank that doesn’t ask for any personal information. They even deliver to public places, like parks and restaurants, to help their buyers keep anonymity. It’s run by two vamps who’ve been collecting and storing undiluted blood for years.”

             “Where do they get their supply?” Shion twisted, watching the mirror to guide his fingers over his upper back and right shoulder blade, where his scar wound up.

             “Hospitals.”

            Shion waited for more elaboration but received instead Safu’s silence. He frowned. “They steal it.” It wasn’t a question.

             “How many vamp-friendly hospitals do you know about?” Safu countered, and Shion could hear her exasperation in her following sigh.

             “There’s still a few out there. I prefer my supply to come from a reputable – ”

             “Reputable? Don’t start this again, Shion. Vamp banks are not reputable. Collecting donated blood for vamps is illegal, just like stealing is. The only difference is you have to pay twenty times more for blood that’s been illegally donated rather than blood that’s been stolen. You can’t keep affording that, that’s why we’re looking for different suppliers, remember?”

             “Yes, Safu, I remember,” Shion replied tightly. He was on his neck now, touching the sides of it, over his Adam’s apple, along to the other side, up around his ear to his cheek. “How much is it?”

             “The online blood supplier I found? They call themselves Discreet Meat. Catchy, right?”

            _Blood isn’t meat,_ Shion wanted to reply, but he couldn’t speak. He was on his cheek now, and this was where he had to coat with the most care, this was where his scar would be most noticeable if he didn’t hide it right.

             “It’s in dollars, they’re American. Thirty dollars per pint. A little over three thousand yen.”

             “American? How much is shipping?”

             “Your current vamp bank is costing you fifty thousand yen a pint, does it really matter how much shipping is for this supplier? It’s a few hundred yen more to ship, Shion, you can’t really say no to this.”

             “My current vamp bank isn’t stealing blood from hospitals.”

             “Vamp banks are going to go out of business. How many times have you tried to make orders to see that they’re out of stock? I’m not going to watch you starve because people aren’t donating blood to vamp banks anymore. I know you don’t want to buy from suppliers who steal, but it’s your only option if you don’t want to starve. People are going to notice, Shion. Your cheekbones are nearly cutting through your face, you look like a starving vampire, you can’t stay under the radar like this.”

            Shion took his fingers from his cheek. Looked in his mirror over his bathroom sink, examined his hollowed cheeks, the bags under his eyes. He had make-up for this too. He could make himself look as if he wasn’t hungry, as if he was eating balanced meals, as if it hadn’t been years since he’d eaten properly, as if he was human and didn’t crave blood every second of the day. His skin was almost too sallow for _Warm Silk_. He might have to switch foundations again, to look for a shade to match his malnourished skin tone.

            This wasn’t the worst Shion had ever experienced. After the Great Slaughter, vamps – who had previously lived in normal society amongst humans without any problem, going to the same schools, working in the same offices, and doing the same jobs – were suddenly labeled as threats to humans that needed to be driven out, and when they didn’t leave, hunted down.

            Shion had only been seven years old when all vamps were forcibly turned from citizens to criminals overnight. At first, the rejection of vamps was only in Japan, the site of the Great Slaughter, but within months, they were outcasted worldwide. Every vamp bank was shut down, and online suppliers were only just beginning to crop up. When they did appear, they were new, unresearched, and it soon came out that several online banks got their blood unethically – through murder or nonconsensual bleedings rather than stealing from hospitals and morgues, as they’d been claiming.

            Karan had tried to get as much blood as she could for Shion from the scarce suppliers there were, but she wasn’t able to afford much – right after the Great Slaughter, blood was even more expensive than it was now – and Shion became accustomed to going weeks without food. There was a point when he when he was forced to drink animal blood, which of course made him sick, caused the scar to appear on his skin, would have killed him if he hadn’t stopped. All vamps who had at some point drank animal blood to survive – which was most of them – had raised red scars of some sort. The most common patterns were pock-marks, like a permanent form of chicken pox, or the winding, snake-like scar that Shion had.

            Before the Great Slaughter, vamp banks were legal, and humans donated blood for vamps as frequently as they did for any other blood donation cause. Shion had been just a boy when vamps were accepted in society, when he hadn’t had to hide with colored contacts and hair dye and _Warm Silk_ foundation. He hardly remembered what it was like, being more or less normal despite his diet.

            It had been twenty years since the Great Slaughter. Shion was twenty-seven years old, often forgot there’d ever been a period in his life when he wasn’t hiding, when he wasn’t starving, when he wasn’t constantly alert for Vamp Hunters, when he wasn’t living in fear.

            Now that it’d been some time since the Great Slaughter, more underground blood banks had popped up, and it was a little easier to get food than it had been in the immediate aftermath of the Great Slaughter. Even so, Shion still struggled to survive, as did all other vamps – though there weren’t many left by now.

            Shion turned on the faucet to wash the remaining foundation off his fingers. He had to scrub hard for at least a minute, as he’d gotten waterproof foundation. When he finished, he covered his plate of foundation with plastic wrap, replaced the foundation under his bathroom sink, and picked up his phone to take it into the bedroom with him.

             “I have to go soon, I have a class in twenty minutes,” Shion told Safu, placing his phone on his bed and heading to his closet.

             “Can I order some for you?”

             “Send me the link, I want to check out the supplier first.”

             “Shion, you have to order it today. It can take a few weeks to ship, and you don’t have a few weeks. Are you completely out of your current supply?”

            Shion pulled on his pants, which slipped from his hips even after he buttoned them. He yanked them up reflexively as he pulled his belt free from the loops of the pair of jeans he’d worn the day before.

            Shion contemplated lying, but he lied to everyone else around him. He lied constantly, always. Safu and his mother were the two people Shion didn’t lie to.

             “No, I’m out,” he admitted. He tightened his belt – another hole skinner than the week before – then looked back into his closet for a clean shirt.

             “I’m ordering it now for you and having it delivered to the coffee place by campus.”

             “Safu, I want to research them first – ”

             “I researched them already. They’re not getting blood from murder or nonconsensual bleeding. It’s just stealing, Shion, no one gets hurt from stealing. I’m getting you the thirty-pint package, there’s a discount for that.”

            Shion pulled on a long-sleeve undershirt before slipping his arms through a button up. He’d been having to layer, finding himself constantly cold, and he knew this was just another sign of his malnourishment.

            He’d been hungry before, he reminded himself. Worse before. He could survive longer than a few days without food. Longer than a few weeks.

             “Okay,” he said. He was tired. He didn’t want to argue. Mostly, he wanted to sleep, but he had to keep up appearances. Missing work was the sign of a starving vamp.

            Dressed, Shion returned to his bathroom, bringing his phone with him, so he could apply the make-up that hid the bags under his eyes, made his cheekbones seem less severe.

             “It’s probably a better idea to have them deliver it somewhere we don’t go often, actually. They recommend on their website using fast food restaurants or gas stations, where people just go in and out regularly. That’s a good idea. I’ll choose a gas station that’s not too close to where we live,” Safu was saying in the phone.

            It was Safu who had shown Shion how to apply make-up to his face so it looked like he wasn’t wearing make-up at all. She bought the make-up and the make-up brushes for him. She drew her own blood with syringes she’d bought online and kept it in vials for Shion, as did his mother, even though Shion had protested at this, even though he hated drinking their blood. They could only donate blood so often, and were always careful not to overdraw, but Shion didn’t care if it was safe, didn’t care when Safu showed him research that claimed giving blood was even healthy for humans who gave it.

            Shion didn’t want Safu or his mother making sacrifices for him. Hated that he couldn’t say no when he hadn’t eaten for weeks and Safu showed up at his door with a vial she’d saved of her own blood for emergencies.

            He finished applying his make-up just as Safu confirmed that she’d made an order and he could pay her later.

             “I have to get to work now, I’ll talk to you later, okay? The confirmation email says it’ll be shipped in eleven days. Can you make it that long?”

             “Of course I can make it that long,” Shion replied, leaving his bathroom again, stooping to put on his shoes, standing back up and ignoring the dizziness of the movement.

             “I’ll come over tonight,” Safu said, and her hesitant tone told Shion what she wasn’t saying.

             “Don’t.” He took his phone off speaker and held it to his ear now.

             “It’s been seven weeks since I drew the last batch – ”

             “And it’s supposed to be eight weeks between donations. You know that,” Shion said, pulling his backpack over his shoulder and leaving his apartment, slamming the door too hard behind him.

            He fumbled with his keys trying to lock it, feeling flustered with his anger.

             “I won’t draw too much, just enough for you to – ”

             “No, Safu!” Shion shouted, slamming his fist against his closed door. He exhaled hard, took his phone from his ear so he wouldn’t have to hear if Safu made any more objections. He stared at his fist against the door for a full minute before he put his phone back to his ear.

            He received silence, glanced at his phone to make sure Safu hadn’t hung up, then replaced it against his face.

             “Safu, please don’t. Come over tonight if you want, but I don’t want your blood, I just want your company.”

             “So I can see you looking half starved to death knowing you won’t let me do anything about it?” Safu demanded.

             “You promised you’d stick to the health board’s regulations. Eight weeks between donations. You promised you wouldn’t keep fighting me on this,” Shion said, letting his hand fall from the door, successfully locking it, heading to his elevator.

             “Fine. I’ll still come over,” Safu said, her words clipped.

             “Just to hang out. Nothing else,” Shion warned.

             “Yes. Fine. I’m hanging up on you now because you’re annoying me.”

             “You’re annoying me too,” Shion replied, smiling faintly and walking into the elevator when the doors opened.

             “You’re annoying me more,” Safu snapped, and then she hung up, and Shion slipped his phone into his pocket.

            He leaned against the back of the elevator and closed his eyes for the ride down. He only lived on the second floor, but he knew if he took the stairs, he’d collapse.

*

Nezumi was not technically a student, but no one really checked or took attendance when it came to big lectures. These lectures had class sizes of over two hundred students, so it was those that Nezumi snuck into regularly when he wasn’t at the theater.

            He particularly liked lectures on classic literature and mechanical engineering, and frequented lectures on these subjects regularly, but he was fine with occasionally sitting in on other types of lectures as well. He’d attended lectures on anthropology and law, history and zoology, ethnography and global studies, translation and ancient world studies, film and mass communication, modern architecture and conceptual physics, philosophy and religion. Generally, Nezumi did not return to lectures on topics that weren’t his two favorite types, but he rarely left the other types of lectures halfway through – unless the lecture was on calculus or chemistry, two topics Nezumi found pointless.

            There was only one lecture outside the subjects of classic literature and mechanical engineering that Nezumi regularly returned to. This lecture was called Ecology and Evolution. The professor of Ecology and Evolution also taught another lecture called Cell Development Biology, but this lecture interfered with Nezumi’s rehearsals at the theater. Sometimes he skipped rehearsals to go to the lecture anyway.

            Nezumi did not care at all about ecology or evolution or cell development. He was interested not in the subject of the lectures, but the professor. The professor’s name was Shion. Nezumi was not used to being interested in people and wasn’t entirely sure what it was about Shion that interested him. On some level, Nezumi knew, it was a sexual interest, but Nezumi could and had hooked up with more attractive men when he wanted. Shion, if anything, had a bland sort of look – brown hair, brown eyes, an average Japanese man of average height.

            He was not remarkable. There was no reason for Nezumi to continue to slip into his lectures, sitting in the back row and watching the professor teach. At the beginning of the semester, when Nezumi first discovered him, the professor walked along the front of the hall, even up and down the stairs in the aisles to get closer to the students he taught. Recently, the professor brought a stool into the lecture hall and sat on it while he taught. He spoke more quietly, but Nezumi still heard him from the back of the room.

            He looked skinnier too, almost gaunt, like a starving vamp, but Nezumi knew this obviously wasn’t the case. There were barely any vamps left, and of the handful that were still alive and in hiding, one certainly wouldn’t be working at the University of Tokyo. This was an accredited university. They must have had vamp screenings before hiring professors – no university would allow a vampire to be near children.

            Besides, vampires were murderers, bloodthirsty and savage, and Shion did not seem like any of the above. He seemed, above all else, kind and obsessed with plant life. Nezumi had experience with vampires – more experience than most. He would know one when he saw it, not that he’d seen any in the past decade. The last info Nezumi had seen regarding vamp population in the news estimated there were only a hundred or so left worldwide that hadn’t yet starved off or gotten caught by Vamp Hunters.

            It was Monday, ten thirty in the morning, which meant the first Ecology and Evolution course of the week was starting, and Nezumi was sitting in his usual seat in the top row of the lecture hall. He didn’t bother putting on any sort of façade, in bringing a backpack or notebooks, in pretending to write notes. Most of the actual students didn’t bring notebooks or take any notes, and Nezumi found himself wondering if they, too, were not students, if they, too, came only for the professor.

            Nezumi didn’t spend much time watching the other students. They were young, traditional college age, while Nezumi was older than them, figured he was likely closer to the professor’s age. The other students spent a lot of time texting or whispering to each other in their seats or scrolling on random websites on their laptops. If they did come to the lectures for the professor like Nezumi did, they hardly did a good job paying attention to him.

            That morning, Nezumi was only looking at the behavior of the students sitting in the rows below him because the professor had not yet showed up. This was not altogether strange. Shion often ran in late, sprinting down the stairs to the front of the hall, dragging his stool to the center of the stage, collapsing on it like without it, he would have crumpled in the middle of the lecture hall.

            Today was no different. Nezumi had been about to pull out his script book to pass the time before Shion showed up when the double doors opened behind him, and Nezumi turned slightly to watch the professor running down the stairs with his backpack bouncing against his back. He went to the side of the front stage, dragged his stool from the corner of it, and placed it in the middle of the stage before collapsing on it.

            “Sorry I’m late, class!” he called out to them, as he always did.

           A few of the class shouted back variations of “Don’t worry about it, professor!” There were several teacher’s pets in the class, students who always sat in the front row, whose names Shion had learned – and Nezumi as well, after so many classes – who raised their hands for every question and asked questions of their own. There were types like this in every lecture Nezumi snuck into, but Shion’s lectures generally had the most students who were engaged. This didn’t surprise Nezumi. He had a magnetic sort of personality, as exhausted as he often seemed.

           Nezumi settled back to learn about nutrient cycling, which Shion announced the lecture would revolve around that day, as the class should have seen looking at their online syllabi. Nezumi pulled out the small desk that was connected to his chair and folded over to the side of it when unused. He rested his elbow on it, his cheek on his palm, fascinated each time Shion smiled over whatever he was going on about.

*

Shion had three classes on Mondays – a lecture and two seminars – and when he returned home, he was exhausted. He went to his kitchen, a small area connected to the bedroom that held mostly nonperishable props in case he had an unexpected visitor – a bag of rice, containers of nuts, coffee, tea bags, cans of beans and tomato sauces, boxes of pasta. He had a few snacks for when Safu came over – the chocolate-cherry granola bars she liked, Cheerios that she ate dry by the handful out of the box, dried cranberries and chocolate chips that she fashioned into an unhealthy trailmix – and he had a few items of dishware, taken from Safu’s set, also generally only used by Safu, though she rarely ate around him unless he had food too.

            In his kitchen, Shion filled a glass with water and drank it in a few gulps, then refilled and downed it six times more until he could trick his stomach into thinking it was full. The trick didn’t always work. He opened the drawer beside his sink that was filled only with packs of gum and took out a pack, as the one in his backpack was empty. He chewed a piece before throwing the rest of the pack in his backpack and pulling out the sheath of student essays he had to grade. He could have allowed his teacher’s assistant to grade them, but Shion preferred to do the work himself. If he kept busy, he couldn’t notice he was hungry.

            It was just past six when Safu texted she was outside his building, so Shion buzzed her in. She lived in the apartment building across the street from his. It was a nicer building, but Shion couldn’t afford it. His money was saved for blood. When he wasn’t exhausted, Shion spent most of his time at Safu’s place, but recently she’d been coming over to his. They both knew he could pass out at any moment, and Shion preferred to pass out in his own home.

            “You look terrible,” Safu announced, letting herself into Shion’s apartment with the key he’d given her.

            Shion looked up from the essay he was trying to read. The text was blurring, and he’d read the same sentence several times without understanding a single character.

            Safu shut the door behind her and came to sit next to Shion on the sofa.

            “Thanks,” he replied.

            “Really terrible.”

            “Safu.”

            Safu sat her purse on her lap, rifled through it, then pulled out a plastic grocery bag. She stuck her hand in the bag, extracted the contents.

            A syringe and a small beaker.

            Shion stood up immediately. “I said no.”

            “I don’t really care. I knew you were going to make a fuss, I should have just done it at my place, but I wanted you to have it fresh. You can’t really afford to miss out on any nutrients right now.”

            Safu had extended her arm. It was late fall, but a heatwave had the weather feeling more like summer, and she wore short sleeves, while Shion had already pulled on two sweaters after returning home. He watched her squeeze her hand into a fist, relax, squeeze it again.

            He kneeled on the floor in front of her. Pressed his hand over the exposed crease of her elbow. “Safu. I’m asking you not to do this. I’m fine. I’ve gone longer – ”

            “Move your hand, Shion, or I’ll tell your mother.”

            Shion squeezed his fingers over his friend’s arm – but not too tightly. He could snap her bones in a second if he wanted to. He had broken her arm once, when they were younger and just playing, and he’d been freshly bitten just a year before. He hadn’t known then what damage he could do.

            “Hasn’t my mother worried enough about me? You can’t tell her it’s gotten this bad.”

            “Then just drink some.”

            “In a week, I will. Eight weeks. We decided on eight weeks, you can’t just – ”

            “I’m not giving you a full donation, just half, less than half even, just two hundred fifty milliliters – ”

            “That’s more than half a donation!”

            “Just two hundred then!” Safu shouted. She pulled at Shion’s wrist, as if she could have the strength to move Shion’s hand from her arm when she knew that even when he was starving, Shion could overpower her.

            Shion let go of her arm anyway. Instead, he reached for the syringe, caught it just before Safu stuck it into her vein and pulled it free from her hand. He pulled up his sweater sleeves and stuck the syringe into his own wrist as Safu shouted.

            “Dammit, Shion!”

            Shion pulled the syringe out his arm. The end of the needle was red, as if speckled in blood, but it wasn’t blood that filled Shion’s veins. It was poison, and if it got into Safu’s bloodstream were she to stick herself with the syringe now, it would kill her.

            “You’re a child!” Safu shouted, picking up her purse and hitting Shion with it.

            He let her, then stood up, went to his dresser for a t-shirt he could wrap the syringe with before throwing it out.

            When he returned from the garbage in the kitchen, Safu was by the front door again.

            “Come on, Safu, don’t leave. I had to do that, you know that.”

            “I don’t know any such thing. I’m going to draw blood at my place and bring it over. It won’t be fresh, but clearly, you’re being too childish for that.”

            Shion’s eyes burned. He wanted to collapse. He shook his head, walked closer to his friend, who opened the door and held up a hand to him.

           “Don’t you try to stop me.”

            “If you bring your blood over here, I’ll dump it down the drain.”

            “That would be very stupid of you, wouldn’t it?” Safu countered.

            “I’m not going to drink it. Safu, I’m fine, I can wait eleven days for the order you put in this morning to get here, I promise. I wouldn’t lie to you.” Shion felt his panic in a fuzzy way, unclear, faded by his fatigue. When Safu left without another word, he only noticed at the slam of his door.

            Shion stood still for a moment, watching the closed door and considering going after his friend, but when he wavered on his feet, he went instead to his bed. He laid down, still dressed, unable to sit up to pull off his clothes.

            A healthy diet for a vampire was a pint of blood a day, but most vamps stretched a pint over weeks. Shion had stretched his last pint to a month, and he hadn’t eaten in a full week since that month.

            His eyes closed easily, fell asleep more easily. When he was woken, the smell of blood was immediate.

            “Sit up,” Safu said gently, her hand on the back of Shion’s head, the other hand holding a plastic water bottle of blood.

            Shion blinked, bleary, disoriented, half-asleep and dizzy, the sharp metallic smell of blood the only thing that gave him the strength to tilt his head up. He put his lips to the edge of the water bottle, cupped his own hands around it – one over Safu’s hand that still held it – and gulped the contents down, squeezing the plastic as he drank.

            He downed the entire water bottle in less than ten seconds. He knew a water bottle was about the same as a full pint. He knew Safu shouldn’t be drawing a pint of blood after only seven weeks after she’d last drawn blood. He knew that when it was safe for Safu to draw blood, it was only safe to draw a pint at a time. He knew all of this, but as he sat up fully, crumpling the empty water bottle and licking his lips, he wanted more and was only relieved when Safu pulled another water bottle out her purse.

            This one was only filled a little more than halfway. Shion reached for it, and Safu pulled it back.

            “Maybe we should ration it,” she said, and only then did Shion notice her voice was breathy.

            Shion blinked at her, fully awake now, senses sharpened from the blood he’d drunk. He leaned forward, pressed his hand to Safu’s chest, and she didn’t pull away.

            Her heartbeat was faint. Her skin was pale.

            “You drew too much.”

            “It’s okay,” Safu whispered.

            “I’m sorry,” Shion told her, and she nodded, her eyes unfocused. “Lie down, you should rest.”

            Safu didn’t protest when Shion guided her to lie on his bed beside him. He took the second water bottle from her hand, and she closed her eyes.

            While her eyes were closed, Shion drank the entirety of the second water bottle. He knew he should save it. He knew he still had eleven days to wait until the blood Safu had ordered came in.

            He didn’t care, and when he finished drinking, he looked down at his pale friend, curled into her side, breathing softly, her eyes closed. He lifted her arm, looked at the band-aid over the crease of her elbow. He could peel it off. Press his lips to her arm. Drink right out her veins.

            Shion took a deep breath. Rubbed his tongue over his teeth, the roof of his mouth, savoring the last tastes of his best friend’s blood, and then he placed Safu’s arm carefully back against her side.

            He lay beside her, looking at her, the pale of her cheeks. The foundation color Shion usually would have chosen for her was _Pearl_ or _Ivory,_ but now, Shion might have chosen a color that didn’t exist. _Translucent,_ he might have called it. _Frail_ , he might have chosen.

            He wanted to be angry with her for drawing too much blood, but more than that, he was relieved. He felt alive for the first time in weeks. Tomorrow, he would let himself shout at her. Tomorrow, he would let himself hate himself, be repulsed by himself for what he was doing to her.

           Now, he would just let them sleep.

*


	2. Chapter 2

Nezumi skipped his rehearsal Tuesday afternoon to attend Shion’s Cell Development Biology course. He got to the lecture hall a minute before class started, and as he reached out for the door, another hand beat him to the handle.

            “After you.”

            Nezumi recognized the voice even before he looked up at the man beside him. Shion was smiling at him, the same smile he had for cytogenesis and ecological recycling and the nerdy students who answered his questions on these same subjects.

            “You’re in my Ecology and Evolution lecture too, aren’t you?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi nodded slowly, not stepping through the door Shion held open. He could tell that whatever sickness Shion had been suffering from was nearly cured. The man looked more alive than he had in weeks.

            Nezumi had never seen his professor at such a close range. Usually, dozens of rows of a two-hundred-person lecture hall separated them.

            “You sit in the back. You should sit in the front sometime. I promise I won’t bite,” Shion said, and then he smiled brightly, looking immensely amused at himself.

            Nezumi eyed the smile, wary of the warmth it pooled into his own stomach, then quickly stepped through the door, unnerved by his professor’s attention to him.

            Not that Nezumi wasn’t used to being noticed. The only reason he’d gotten into acting was because his manager had seen him at a grocery store ten years before, approached him and asked if he’d ever been on a stage, said he had just the face for it.

            Nezumi had been prepared to hit the guy before the latter informed Nezumi he worked at one of the biggest theaters in Tokyo and mentioned the salary of an average actor in his plays.

            _And that’s just average. If you can read lines half as well as you can look good choosing a bunch of bananas, you’ll be a star._

            His manager, for as insufferable as he proved to be in the years that followed, had been right about this one thing. Nezumi had become a star, and he was making decent cash doing it.

            “I prefer the back,” Nezumi said, glancing back at Shion, who had followed him into the lecture hall.

            Shion had his thumbs hooked under his backpack straps. He wore a white button-down shirt layered over a grey long-sleeved shirt. Nezumi had no idea how the guy wasn’t sweating in the heatwave.

            Shion was looking at Nezumi carefully, not making any move to bound down the lecture hall steps to the front stage the way he usually did. “Is your name Kaito?” he asked, after a moment, and Nezumi narrowed his eyes.

            “No.”

            Shion hummed in a curious way, as if Nezumi’s answer was strange. He didn’t ask Nezumi’s actual name, and Nezumi was glad for this – he wouldn’t be on the roster. Then again, it was impossible that Shion would know every student in his lecture.

            “You should probably start teaching us something,” Nezumi suggested, when Shion kept staring at him.

            Shion smiled, then, the expression transforming his face again. “I probably should,” he agreed, and then he was turning, bounding down the steps that lined the rows of seats.

            Nezumi watched him for a moment, then slid into the top row. Another student was in his usual seat in the center of the row, so Nezumi sat a few away from him, closer to the aisle. He was pulling his hair up into a ponytail when Shion addressed the class. He was not on his stool today, but walking along the front rows of the hall, energized and exuberant as he had been the first few lectures of the semester months before.

            It was the mid-November, and Nezumi had been sitting in on Shion’s lectures since early September. He didn’t know why he kept coming, what it was about Shion that had him sitting through an hour and a half long lecture about cellular activity and the evolution of primitive plantlife when Nezumi had never before spent any time in his life thinking about nature.

            He was still trying to figure out what the hell he was doing wasting so much of his time in these classes an hour and a half later, when the lecture ended, and Shion pulled the stool he usually sat on to the middle of the stage.

            He placed his backpack on the stool, then heaved out a fat pile of papers. He bent down and placed the papers along the edge of the stage in several different stacks.

            “Class, come get your graded papers before you leave, they’re stacked alphabetically by family name. If you can’t find your paper, that means I didn’t get it either. Email it to me by tonight, and I’ll pretend I got it on time. Revisions are accepted if you come to my office hours to discuss what you plan to revise. Turn them in by next week. Grades are otherwise final unless you can give me a compelling argument as to why I did a terrible job grading your paper. If your argument is a waste of my time, I’ll lower your grade, so please make a case for yourself before you come to see me. But I am reasonable and understand that even professors make mistakes, so if your argument is good, you will be rewarded. There’s a few of you whose papers would do well in a couple conferences coming up, and I wrote that on your papers, so please come to see me if you’re interested. Email me if you can’t make my office hours, and we’ll work something out!” Shion shouted, above the noise of the students shuffling about, zipping backpacks, slamming their chairs up, and pushing each other to get to the front, where they fought over the stacks of papers.

            Shion stood to the side, watching them all, and then his gaze rose suddenly, and he was looking directly at Nezumi, who still sat in his seat.

            Nezumi blinked, waited for Shion to look away from him, certain the professor was merely scanning the hall in the routine way he swept his gaze around during lectures, but Shion didn’t look away. He continued to stare at Nezumi, who continued to stare back, feeling his heartbeat in his ears and unsure of the feeling.

            After half a minute, Shion lifted a hand, pointed at the students who were rummaging through the stacks like wild animals. He raised an eyebrow, and Nezumi understood what the look meant.

            _Aren’t you coming for your paper?_

            Nezumi tapped his fingers on the fold-out desk beside his seat. He hadn’t written a paper, obviously.

            Nezumi shrugged, doubting Shion could even see the gesture from down the lecture hall, but then Shion was grabbing his backpack from the stool and walking off the stage, slipping through the students as he climbed up the stairs to the back of the hall.

            When he made it to Nezumi’s row, he pulled off his backpack and sat beside Nezumi, but didn’t look at him.

            “It all looks so chaotic from up here,” Shion said, looking down at his students.

            Nezumi nodded, watching Shion’s profile. He had no idea why the professor was sitting next to him, but he didn’t altogether mind.

            “I guess that’s why you’re sitting up here. Waiting for the other students to clear out so you can grab your essay quickly. Smart.” There was an unreadable undercurrent to the professor’s voice that had Nezumi squinting at him, but Shion continued to look down at the students below them.

            “I guess so,” Nezumi said slowly.

            “Unless you didn’t turn in an essay,” Shion suggested airily, as if such a thing wouldn’t bother him at all.

            Nezumi said nothing to this, and then the professor was turning, looking at him, his smile slight, amused.

            “You’re not enrolled in this class.”

            “Is that an accusation?” Nezumi asked.

            “No. It’s a fact. There’s only five students enrolled in both of my courses this year, and four are girls. The boy’s name is Kaito, which you said is not your name. We get photographs along with names, and I don’t recognize you from a photograph.”

            “There’s got to be two hundred kids in this class,” Nezumi replied, leaning back in his seat.

            “Three hundred fifty-six. But I’d remember your face if I saw it, even among three hundred fifty-six students. Even if I was just scanning their photographs before I started my courses at the beginning of the semester.”

            Nezumi stared. “Am I supposed to be flattered?”

            Shion smiled again. “If you want, sure, I’d be honored to flatter you.”

            “Shouldn’t you be yelling at me for sneaking into your lectures?”

            “I’m flattered,” Shion replied, his smile spreading.

            Nezumi had no idea what to say to this guy. He settled on saying nothing at all, on just looking at him, now that the professor was in close range again.

            He had very smooth skin. Dark brown eyes, almost black. Sharp cheekbones. Pink lips. An almost goofy smile, like it was close to breaking into laughter.

            “You’re older than the students. How old are you?” Shion asked, around his smile.

            Nezumi squinted. “That’s a personal question.”

            “Is it just my classes you’re not enrolled in, or are you not a student of the university at all?”

            “Another personal question,” Nezumi replied slowly.

            “I don’t think that one’s technically personal. I ask because if you’re not a student at the university and you’re close enough to me in age for it to be appropriate, then I’d like to ask you to get coffee with me,” Shion said, as matter-of-factly as he gave his lectures. “I’m twenty-seven, so you can judge the appropriateness for yourself.”

            He watched Nezumi with his direct gaze, like Nezumi was a student and he was asking a question he expected some academic, cell-related answer to.

            “If I was a student at the university, I could lie to you, and then we could get coffee, and the university could find out, and you could be fired,” Nezumi pointed out, looking away from Shion to observe the other students who were still in the hall.

            There were still several dozen students milling around, but Shion didn’t seem to remember he was still in a lecture hall with his students, that this was definitely an inappropriate place to be asking someone to get coffee.

            “Those are a lot of hypotheticals,” Shion said. “But I guess you’re right, you could lie, and I could be fired because of it. I hope that’s enough motive for you to tell the truth.”

            “Why should I care if you’re fired?”

            “You seem to enjoy my lectures, which I won’t be able to do if I’m fired,” Shion replied easily.

            Nezumi decided something about this guy annoyed him. He seemed oddly calm, too rational, acting like asking someone for coffee was the same as an academic conversation. What kind of person did that?

            “I’m not a student at the university,” Nezumi said finally.

            The professor smiled at him – of course he did. “That just leaves your age. I don’t think you’re as young as the actual students. I think you’re close to my age. Maybe you are my age. Maybe you’re older.”        

            “That’s a lot of hypotheticals,” Nezumi replied, and Shion laughed.

            “I’d rather not go to the campus coffee shop, but there’s one a few blocks down that doesn’t usually have any of my students.”

            “I didn’t say I’d go with you,” Nezumi reminded, as Shion stood up, stooping back down to grab his backpack from the floor and swing it over his shoulders. The lecture hall was now empty but for a handful of students who lingered at the front, flipping through their papers and chatting.

            “If you didn’t want to, you’d have said so immediately after I asked. You wouldn’t have suggested hypothetical scenarios or admitted you weren’t a student. Of course, I just made a conclusion based on the evidence, but I can always be wrong.”

            “Do you always talk like this?” Nezumi muttered, standing as well.

            “Like what?”

            “I don’t know. Like an annoying professor.”

            “I am a professor, I can’t just turn that off. And if you really found me annoying, why would you want to get coffee with me?” Shion asked, leading Nezumi out of the lecture hall.

            Nezumi strung his fingers through his bangs. “I have no idea,” he said under his breath, but even so, he followed Shion out the building, out into the late afternoon. Wind pulled at his ponytail, pushed his bangs back over his eyes, and when he lifted them from his face, it was to see Shion staring at him.

            “What?”

            “I just realized. I don’t know your name.”

            “That’s another personal question,” Nezumi replied, walking with Shion to the crosswalk, which was clogged with students.

            “I know. That’s why I asked,” Shion said, as the crosswalk signal told them to walk.

            They crossed the street, and when Nezumi still couldn’t think of a good reason not to tell Shion his name by the time they got to the other side, he offered it. “Nezumi,” he said, and the professor smiled that smile of his.

            “Nezumi,” he repeated, saying Nezumi’s name like he was calling on Nezumi in class, so Nezumi waited, wondering what the professor would ask him next.

*

Shion didn’t like coffee. He didn’t like any human drinks. Everything but water made him feel sick, and oftentimes he threw up if he was forced to eat or drink human food for some sort of occasion that demanded he do so in order to keep up appearances.

            He ordered a small black iced coffee, extra ice, hoping the ice would dilute the coffee, or at least take up space in his cup so that less coffee could fit in it. He never initiated scenarios where he’d have to eat or drink around humans, but he couldn’t think of another place to ask Nezumi to go with him, and he’d wanted to ask Nezumi to go with him somewhere.

            Shion had noticed the man the very first day of the semester in his first lecture, and then he’d noticed him again in his second lecture. He could tell immediately Nezumi was older than the other students, and while it wasn’t completely unheard of for an older student to enroll in classes, it was rare enough for Nezumi to catch Shion’s eye.

            Or maybe what caught Shion’s eye was simply that Nezumi was incredibly beautiful, and Shion had been instantly attracted to him. He’d returned home to look through the student identification photos and found none that matched Nezumi. Even so, Nezumi continued to show up.

           Shion did not plan to actually speak to him until earlier that afternoon at the door of the lecture hall, when he was close enough to Nezumi to notice the color of Nezumi’s eyes.

            “You’re cold,” Nezumi said.

            Shion stopped chewing on his straw. He put down his coffee, which he hadn’t even sipped.

            “It’s the iced coffee,” he said.

            “You didn’t drink any of the coffee. You’ve been shivering since we got here. Yet you still ordered iced coffee.”

            Shion couldn’t argue with this. He didn’t have enough body mass to warm him properly. He hadn’t in a while, leaving him constantly cold, and although this was a stereotype of vampires, it wasn’t necessarily a true one. Vampires could have body heat, could be as warm as humans, but only if they had enough nutrients and body mass to do so. Shion doubted there were any vampires still alive who were able to eat enough to be warm.

            “I don’t like hot coffee,” Shion said finally, which was true. He didn’t like hot coffee. He didn’t like iced coffee. He didn’t like any coffee.

            He wondered if Nezumi believed in vampire stereotypes. There were worse ones than having cold body temperatures. There were stereotypes that labeled vamps as savage beasts. As uncontrollable. As murderers.

            Shion had a good feeling Nezumi did believe these stereotypes. Shion had a good feeling Nezumi hated vampires more than the general public. Shion had a good feeling that he should get as far away from Nezumi as possible, and he’d had this feeling since he noticed Nezumi’s eye color, but Shion didn’t want to listen to this feeling.

             “You’re the one who suggested we go to a coffee place.”

            “I couldn’t think of any other place to suggest we go.”

            “You could have ordered tea,” Nezumi replied. He’d ordered black tea. His was hot, and he had his hands cupped around his mug. He had long fingers and incredibly pale skin. If he used foundation, Shion might have guessed his shade would be _Porcelain_ or _Snow White._

            “I don’t like tea,” Shion said. Tea had the same effect as coffee. When he was young, he used to love tea. He’d have it with the pastries his mother baked in her bakery. Shion thought about telling Nezumi this. He had the strange desire to tell Nezumi everything about him.

            But he couldn’t tell him everything. He knew this, bit the inside of his cheek to remind himself of this.

            “What do you like?” Nezumi asked, raising an eyebrow.

            Shion liked to look at Nezumi. The man had sweeping dark hair, long and inky. He had it pulled up in a ponytail. His bangs fell over his face often, and just as often, he pushed them back behind his ears with his long fingers.

            Every single one of his features was a staple of the Japanese dynasty that had been wiped out twenty years ago in the Great Slaughter. The most telling attribute of the Gin Dynasty, of course, were the silver eyes. Shion hadn’t known there were any survivors of the slaughter. He didn’t know Nezumi’s age, and decided it was his own. Twenty-seven. Nezumi would have been only seven years old when his entire lineage had been killed by vampires.

            “I like ice,” Shion said, because Nezumi was waiting for an answer, and Shion could not reply with the truth.

            There had been a few hundred vampires involved in the Great Slaughter. There had been thousands of victims. An entire dynasty gone. The result was worldwide panic. Vampires outcasted, then hunted. It was worst in Japan, as the Great Slaughter had happened in Kyoto, but there’d been vamp massacres worldwide for years. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world caught up to hold the same prejudices.

            “Even when you’re cold?” Nezumi asked, his voice light and his question rhetorical, but his gaze was piercing. He sipped his tea, his movements graceful.

           There was never a reason for why the Gin Dynasty in particular had been targeted, but Shion thought, looking at Nezumi, that he now understood.

            Nezumi was very beautiful. Everyone from the Gin Dynasty was thought to look just like him, and Shion had always assumed it was an exaggeration, but he could see now it was not. Nezumi was stunning. Otherworldly. To think of him as delicious would not be so unexpected. To think he might taste incredible, to want to sink teeth into that skin, to want to press his lips to Nezumi’s throat and drink straight from his light green veins – Shion could understand.

            He lifted his cup to his lips. Tried to only let ice fall into his mouth. Got a few drops of coffee and tried not to cringe at the bitter taste. He crunched hard on the ice, concentrated on the hardness of the crunch.

            A vamp hunger trick. Chew on ice until your mouth is numb. Chew gum. Chug water. Distract yourself with something else, like beautiful strangers who crash your university lectures.

            “I’ve seen you on campus even when I don’t have lectures. So you go to other classes too.”

            “Are you stalking me?” Nezumi asked.

            A vamp stereotype. They stalk human prey. They aren’t to be trusted.

            “No. But you’re noticeable, and I’ve noticed you. You could just enroll.”

            “Or I could drop in on classes for free.”

            “But you won’t get a diploma.”

            “I don’t want a diploma,” Nezumi replied. When he didn’t drink his tea, he traced the lip of his mug with his forefinger counter-clockwise. Shion wondered what it might be like to be touched by him. To feel Nezumi trace circles on his own skin, counter-clockwise.

            “What do you do?” Shion asked. He tried to think of jobs that didn’t need diplomas to distract himself from thinking about Nezumi touching him. It was a ridiculous thought. Shion had never been touched by anyone. His overwhelming drive was always hunger, and it didn’t leave much room for sexual desire. Even when he did have rare spouts of sexual desire, there was no human who would have sex with a vamp, and he couldn’t risk sex while pretending to be human. His foundation was waterproof, but it was not touch proof. It would rub off. He would be discovered, reported to a Vamp Hunter.

            He could have sex with another vamp, but he knew none of those. There were a handful of underground vamp societies, but Shion had never tried to join any. Oftentimes, they were fake, traps run by Vamp Hunters to lure naïve and lonely vamps.

            “I’m an actor,” Nezumi said, which surprised Shion. He’d expected Nezumi to refuse to answer, the way he had most of his questions.

            “Movies?”

            “Theater,” Nezumi replied. He tucked his bangs behind his ear. Shion wanted to run his own fingers through the inky silk. He wanted to find Nezumi’s hair color in a store, boxed, so he could dye his own hair with it. He wanted to run his fingers through his hair and pretend it was Nezumi’s.

            Shion put his cup back to his lips. Crunched on more ice, hard, feeling his teeth go numb.

            “I’ve never gone to the theater,” he finally said, when he finished crunching. His mouth felt sore and cold. He tucked his hands between his thighs.

            “That’s hardly fair. I’ve gone to several of your lectures,” Nezumi said.

            Shion smiled. Nezumi was flirting with him, and he was amazed at this, enthralled by this. “Are you inviting me to one of your shows?”

            “Hardly.”

            “I’d like to see you. What kinds of shows are you in?”

            Nezumi waved his hand, as if he couldn’t even be bothered to care what he did for a living. “Traditional plays, musicals, anything.”

            “Where do you work?”

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes for a moment, as if deciding whether not to give the information. “Shinbashi,” he finally said.

            Shion leaned forward. “Shinbashi Enbujo Theater?”

            “You know it?” Nezumi asked lightly, not sounding concerned.

            “Everyone knows it! That’s amazing, Nezumi, you must be really talented.”

            Nezumi sipped his tea. Shion couldn’t imagine him as a famous actor. He was beautiful, but he had a quiet way about him, like his very presence was a whisper, and Shion felt a constant temptation to lean in closer so that he might hear Nezumi’s secrets. It was hard to think of him projecting his voice to an entire room. It was easier to think the audience would be so captivated that no one made a sound, and maybe that was the only reason Nezumi could be heard.

            “Are you in a show right now? Which one?”

            “Are you wearing a watch?” Nezumi asked back.

            Shion blinked, then slipped one of his hands free from his thighs, pushed his sleeves back to reveal his watch.

            Nezumi reached out, then, caught Shion’s hand and pulled it across the small table before Shion could move away.

            Shion fought the instinct to jerk back. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched him outside of Safu and his mother and the vampire that bit him when he was three years old. The feeling was strange. Intimate, even though Nezumi only touched his hand. Nezumi’s fingers were extremely warm.

            “You’re cold,” Nezumi told him. He was looking down at Shion’s wrist, his bangs shielding his expression.

            “Sorry,” Shion whispered back. He could barely speak. He wanted Nezumi to touch him all over. To warm him. To never let him go.

            Nezumi let go. “My afternoon rehearsal just ended. I have a show in a half hour.” 

            “Right now?”

            “A half hour,” Nezumi repeated, glancing up at Shion.

            “But – If you were supposed to be at rehearsal, why were you in my class? Why did you get coffee?”

            “I got tea,” Nezumi replied. He picked up his mug as if to show Shion evidence, then drank the rest of it. Shion watched his throat move with the motion. He thought about Nezumi’s fingers on his skin. Warm from his tea. Long. He had a firm grip. He had not touched Shion shyly, but as if they knew each other, as if he often touched Shion.

            Nezumi stood up, so Shion did as well.

            “You didn’t drink your coffee,” Nezumi said, gesturing to Shion’s cup.

            “Do you want it?”      

            “Nope, I don’t like coffee,” Nezumi replied, and then he was turning, placing his mug on the tray for used dishes before heading out the coffee shop.

            Shion followed him, throwing out what remained of his iced coffee as he left. Outside, the wind had picked up, and Shion hugged his arms around himself as they walked. He wanted to press himself into Nezumi’s side. He peeked at Nezumi’s profile, at Nezumi’s lips where strands of his hair had stuck, blown by the wind. He wondered what it’d be like to kiss Nezumi. He wondered what it’d be like to kiss anyone. It’d been a while since he’d even let himself wonder.

            “If you’re following me to go to my show, you can’t. Tonight’s show is sold out. We’re sold out for a few weeks.”

            “I’ll get a ticket for several weeks from now,” Shion replied.

            “You don’t even know what show it is.”

            “What show is it?”

            “ _Julius Caesar._ Shakespeare.”

            “I’d like to get a ticket for that,” Shion said, though he’d never really cared for Shakespeare. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to see the show. He was going to see Nezumi, and he knew Nezumi knew this.

            “They sell tickets online.”

            “Are you telling me you don’t want me to walk with you to the theater?” Shion asked. They’d stopped on the sidewalk, and Nezumi looked at him. His hair continued to blow about his face, off his lips, on again.

            “I’m telling you they sell tickets online. You can do what you want. You look cold, so I figured you wouldn’t want to walk. The theater is at least twenty minutes away.”

            “You don’t take the subway?”

            Nezumi stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay, let’s take the subway.”

            Nezumi changed direction, and Shion followed him. They walked down the stairs into the subway amongst the Tokyo crowd, scanned their subway cards, then headed to the trains, standing beside each other once they got to the right platform to wait for theirs.

            In the train carriage, it was crowded. Shion was nearly pressed to Nezumi’s body, and when the train lurched, he fell into Nezumi’s chest. Nezumi reached out, grabbed onto Shion’s backpack strap, his hand curled between the strap and Shion’s chest.

            “Careful,” Nezumi said. The sound of the train rushed through Shion’s ears. He hoped it would never stop. He hoped it would lurch again, and he’d fall into Nezumi again. He hoped Nezumi would let go of his backpack strap to touch the underside of Shion’s chin, to tilt his face upward. He hoped Nezumi would kiss him.

            He didn’t understand his own desire. No, of course he did. Nezumi was attractive. It was only natural to want to kiss him. It was only human to want to kiss him, and Shion couldn’t help that sometimes he felt human.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes at Shion, who stopped staring at him, looked instead over Nezumi’s shoulder at the wall of the train. The train stopped, and the doors opened.

            “Not us,” Nezumi said. “Are you going out of your way to come with me to the theater? Where do you live?”

            “By the university, about a five-minute walk from campus.”

            “So you are going out of your way.”

            “I don’t mind.”

            “It doesn’t seem logical,” Nezumi said. His hand was still around Shion’s backpack strap, as if he’d forgotten he’d left it there.

            “Maybe I’m not logical.”       

            Nezumi looked down at him. Shion loved to be looked at by him. His gaze was heavy. He looked at Shion like Shion was a mystery, and Shion liked being a mystery. He hoped Nezumi would never solve him. Would always wonder, wonder, but never figure out what Shion was.

            The train stopped again.

            “Not us,” Nezumi said again. “It’s three more stops. You really shouldn’t come all the way just to buy a ticket.”

            “I’m not coming all the way just to buy a ticket,” Shion said.

            Nezumi looked away from him. His body rocked with the train. He was tall. He had long limbs. He wore black jeans and black boots and a light blue t-shirt. He smelled earthy, not like sweat, but human, solid, real.

            “Am I creeping you out? Do you think I’m stalking you?” Shion asked. He didn’t want the answer. He wanted to follow Nezumi wherever he went. He’d never felt a want like this, a want for a person. All he’d known since he’d been bitten was a want for blood, and he distracted that want with tamer wants – a want for knowledge, a want for education, a want for a career, a want for the ability to have a positive effect on the lives of others, a want to blend in.

            Never a want like this. A want that thrummed with his heart. A want that flooded through him. He didn’t even know Nezumi, but he knew the way Nezumi looked at him, and maybe in the end, it was just a want for that.

            “I’ve had stalkers before. You’re not quite the same,” Nezumi said easily.

            “What am I, then?” Despite his wants, Shion needed Nezumi to know what he was. He needed to tell Nezumi now, before he let himself get delusional.

            He could never have anything like Nezumi. Nezumi would never want anything to do with him. It was hopeless. It was silly. Shion wanted it so badly it nearly buckled his knees.

            He wanted something in his life that wasn’t hunger for blood. Something in his life that didn’t have anything to do with blood. Someone in his life that didn’t know he was a vamp. Someone in his life who thought he was human, because sometimes Shion forgot he wasn’t, forgot he was considered a monster, forgot he could never live a normal life.

            Nezumi, Shion thought, could make him forget again and again. A look from Nezumi, and Shion could forget everything in the world, even the worst parts.

            Nezumi was looking at him then, that same look, and the train stopped again, and the doors opened again, and someone walking into the train pushed Shion, who stepped forward, into Nezumi’s chest.

            “You’re an annoying professor,” Nezumi said, when Shion stepped back from him.

            Shion looked up, thought that the hard silver of Nezumi’s gaze had softened, and wondered if it was the strange lighting of the rumbling train carriage that made it look this way.

            He wondered more how a quiet look from a man he barely knew could possibly flood him with the warmth that had been absent from his body for longer than he could remember.

*


	3. Chapter 3

Nezumi considered his options with Shion.

            He was ninety percent sure he could sleep with the man. Ninety-five percent, even. Shion was clearly attracted to him, and despite following Nezumi to the theater, he didn’t give off any sort of threatening vibes. Nezumi knew, if he’d told Shion not to follow him, Shion would have listened.

            He was cute. He had a nice smile, genuine and almost childish, but Nezumi didn’t mind this as much as he thought he would. Nezumi considered the option of sleeping with him very seriously, more seriously than any of his other options.

            It helped that Nezumi wasn’t sure what his other options were. Dating, he supposed, not that he had much experience with that. He wasn’t sure if coffee and getting accompanied to the theater was a date. He wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be a date when one-night stands and relationships that were purely casual had worked just fine for him all his life. He wasn’t sure about most things in terms of Shion, despite the ridiculous and embarrassing amount of time he spent thinking about Shion after he parted ways with the man once they got to the theater, Shion going to the front to get tickets for the next show that wasn’t sold out, and Nezumi going backstage.

            It was Friday morning. Another Ecology and Evolution lecture. Nezumi sat in the front row of the lecture hall, and Shion smiled at him in what seemed to Nezumi to be a recklessly cheerful way before he starting rambling on about something called niche theory.

            Shion did not give Nezumi any lingering looks during his lecture. He did not give any indication at all during his lecture that he might be willing to sleep with Nezumi or date Nezumi, and Nezumi began to doubt his earlier assumptions. But when the lecture ended, Shion waited for the front row to vacate before walking up to Nezumi.

            He smiled again, a smile that might have said, _I am open to fucking or dating_ , but Nezumi couldn’t be sure. There was something strange about Shion, something Nezumi couldn’t read despite the fact that he was generally good at reading people. He knew when people had ulterior motives, but he didn’t think Shion had ulterior motives. He didn’t know what sort of motives Shion had. He seemed too innocent for motives at all.

            “Are you missing another rehearsal for this lecture?” Shion asked, as Nezumi stood up from his seat.

            “No need to worry, professor, I’m not putting off any responsibilities this morning.”

            “So you’re free?”

            “Are you going to ask me to get coffee again?”

            Shion squeezed his backpack straps as he led Nezumi out the lecture hall. “We could do something else.”

            “Like what?” Nezumi asked, narrowing his eyes at Shion, trying to figure out if _something else_ meant sex or a date.

            “Usually on Fridays, since I just have this one lecture, I spend the rest of the day at my mother’s bakery helping her. You could come too, if you wanted.”

            The activity didn’t seem at all to have anything to do with sex or dating. Nezumi examined Shion.

            “Why would I want to do that?”

            “Maybe you like to bake,” Shion suggested.

            “I’ve never baked in my life.”

            “Maybe you’re looking for new life experiences.”

            “Baking isn’t a bucket list item.”

            “I don’t see why not. It can be very thrilling,” Shion replied, in such a straightforward manner Nezumi could not tell if he was joking. Really, Nezumi could not tell anything about this man.

            “Are you a stalker?” Nezumi asked, unsure now. “Is this how you stalk people? It’s not conventional. Or effective.”

            Shion side-stepped a group of students in the hallway easily, leading them out to the exit of the building as he had two days before. “I’m not a stalker, we already discussed that, twice I believe. You’re not interested in the subjects of my lectures, but you keep coming. It must be for me.”

            “How do you know what subjects I’m interested in?”

            “Tell me one thing I lectured on today,” Shion retorted, looking at Nezumi with his arms crossed, and Nezumi couldn’t tell if it was because the man was cold – once again, he wore long-sleeved layers despite the continuing late November heatwave – or because he was gesturing to match the challenge in his voice.

            “Plants. Animals. Nature.”

            “More specific.”

            “Photosynthesis,” Nezumi guessed. Shion’s laugh came out of nowhere, startled Nezumi so that he stopped walking, stood and stared as Shion glanced back over his shoulder, the laugh still on his lips.

            “Why’d you stop?”

            “No reason,” Nezumi said, catching up to him again, continuing down the campus path to the road only because that was where Shion was leading him.

            “I didn’t talk about photosynthesis. You weren’t paying attention. I doubt you ever pay attention, but you still come to my lectures. I’m assuming it’s because of me. I asked you to come to my mother’s bakery with me so you could continue spending time with me. And so I could spend time with you, because I like doing that as well, despite your continuous stalker accusations, which are completely unfounded.”

            “I don’t come to your lectures because of you,” Nezumi objected, hardly having listened to anything Shion said afterward.

            “Then why do you come to my lectures? There’s nothing wrong with being interested in someone, you certainly don’t have to be embarrassed, I just admitted to feeling the same about you. We’re grown adults, isn’t it childish to be in denial about our feelings?”

            “Do you ever filter your thoughts? Who said I’m interested in you? I don’t even know you. You’re so wild about evidence, all evidence points to you being a self-obsessed lunatic.”

            “The evidence is actually that you’re still following me to my mother’s bakery, so you must enjoy my company whether or not you want to admit it. It’s fine if you don’t want to admit it, but you can stop arguing so much. It makes it difficult to have any other conversation, and I’d like to get to know you more.”

            “So that’s a no to the filter, you just always spout every thought you have,” Nezumi concluded, shaking his head. He pushed his bangs from his eyes, looked up the street to try to figure out where they were. He hadn’t been in this side of the city before. It was quaint, more like a town than a city. “Where are we?”

            “My mom’s bakery isn’t far from campus, I basically grew up in this little college town. Did you grow up in Tokyo?”

            “Is this the part where you start asking more personal questions?”

            “Are you single?” Shion asked back. They’d stopped at a crosswalk again. Beside them was an ice cream shop that looked like something out of a movie, picture perfect.

            Nezumi slipped his hands in his pockets. “Am I supposed to ignore the Tokyo question now?”

            “You can answer it. I’m more interested in if you’re single, but I’d also like to know where you grew up.”

            “I didn’t grow up in Tokyo,” Nezumi replied, leading Shion when the crosswalk signal changed.

            “Does that mean you’re not single?”

            “I doubt there’s ever been a conclusive study proving a correlation between growing up in Tokyo and relationship status.”

            Shion hummed, and Nezumi glanced at him. “You’re evasive.”

            “Am I?”

            Shion smiled. “You don’t have to tell me. I was mostly asking because if I wanted to kiss you today, I thought it’d be useful to know if you’d pull away and punch me or something dramatic like that.”

            Nezumi didn’t know why he was shocked by the words. He knew by now Shion was not normal. He knew Shion said everything he thought. This should not have been unexpected – Nezumi had already concluded there was a ninety-five percent chance, at least, that Shion was sexually interested in him.

           “By that logic, anyone who’s not single would welcome being kissed by you,” Nezumi said, after a moment.

           “Not anyone. Just people who go to all of my lectures even though they don’t care about ecology or cell development.”

           “It’s forward to imply I might be interested in kissing a man. I could be conservative.”

            “If you’re not interested, you could tell me. I’d rather know before I tried to kiss you.”

            Shion led them around a corner, and the shade they’d been in was thrown in a different direction. The sun was immediately in Nezumi’s eyes, making him squint down at his boots. He watched Shion’s steps beside him. The professor wore light blue Converse despite his otherwise professional appearance. They were scuffed, had a hole in them. As they walked, their steps were aligned. Left foot, right foot.

            “I’m not conservative,” Nezumi finally said, glancing up from the hole in Shion’s Converse, seeing Shion’s small smile in his profile. “And I’m from Kyoto. Any more questions, professor?”

            “I think that’s it for now. We’re here, anyway,” Shion said, stopping and turning to face the shop beside them.

            The door opened as Nezumi stopped beside Shion, and a family came out along with the strong smell of cinnamon and sweet fruit.

            “My mother’s bakery,” Shion announced, stepping forward to hold the door for the family – a woman and two young boys, both with icing on their lips and cheeks.

            The woman stared at Nezumi as she walked by him, but Nezumi was used to stares, offered her his charming theater smile to put her at ease before walking through the door Shion held for him.

            The bakery was crowded and warm, the smells that had wafted outside almost overwhelming. Nezumi had never cared for sweets, but he felt drawn in by the smell, continued walking toward the display glass case across the shop where customers were crowded until he felt Shion’s hand on his arm, cool fingers that made him flinch.

            “This way,” Shion said gently, loosening his grip so that it felt more like cold air than fingers surrounded his forearm.

            Nezumi didn’t pull away. He let Shion pull him around the customers, to the side of the counter and then behind it.

            “Hi, Mom,” Shion said to the other person behind the counter, a woman who was putting money in a register and didn’t look up even as she spoke.

           “Shion, I’m so glad you’re here, can you check on the blueberry scones? I’m sure they’re done.” Shion’s mother looked exactly like Shion but that she was older, her face much softer, her hair longer and pulled into a ponytail. A blue bandana was tied around her face to keep loose hair off of it.

            Shion’s mother gave the customer in front of her his change before finally looking at her son, but her glance at him was quick. Almost immediately, she was looking at Nezumi, her mouth opening.

            “Oh,” she said quietly, her hand coming to her lips.

            “He’s a friend,” Shion said quickly.

            Nezumi didn’t understand the quickness of Shion’s words, almost defensive, nor the way Shion’s mother’s gaze went from Nezumi to Shion and back again.

           Nezumi was used to stares – people thought the Gin Dynasty had been wiped out completely, and Nezumi was well aware that his very existence was a shock to many. Surprise, he was used to. But this woman’s expression was not only surprised. There was fear there too, but it lasted only a few seconds before vanishing.

            The woman collected herself, dropping her hand from her lips and blinking quickly. “It’s lovely to meet you,” she finally said, though her voice was a bit breathless. “I’m Karan.”

            “Nezumi,” Nezumi replied carefully.

            “Nezumi’s going to help me in the kitchen. You can trust him,” Shion said, his voice more empathic than it probably needed to be, but Nezumi didn’t have time to think about it, as Shion was pulling him again, past his mother and through a door that led into a hallway, and then through a swinging door that took them into the kitchen.

            “I’m guessing your mother doesn’t trust people in her kitchen,” Nezumi said slowly, watching Shion as the man let go of him and went to the sink to wash his hands.

            “If I trust you, she will. I’ve been baking in here since I was a kid. Come wash your hands.”

            Nezumi thought about the fear mixed with Karan’s shock. He thought about walking out of the kitchen, going up to her, watching her closely to examine how she reacted to him a second time, trying to see if he could figure her out.

            He didn’t do any of that. He waited for Shion to finish washing his hands, then stepped up to the sink, felt that the water Shion had used was warm, and he turned the faucet so that it’d be cool. He already felt sweat building under his arms in the heat of the kitchen.

            “Apron?” Shion asked, after Nezumi dried his hands, so Nezumi took the blue and white checkered apron Shion offered him. Shion himself wore a white apron that said in large red letters, “Hot Stuff Coming Through.”

            “Nice apron,” Nezumi commented, and Shion laughed. He had a nice laugh, loud and genuine.

            “My friend Safu bought it for me. She’s been baking here as long as I have, she’s basically like my sister. Do you have any siblings?”

            Shion spoke into the oven he had opened and was peering into. Nezumi watched him slide his hand into an oven mitt before reaching to pull out the pan of what he assumed were blueberry scones.

            “Why is it that you’re always the one asking the personal questions?” Nezumi asked, as Shion placed the pan of scones on a counter.

            “Help me put these on that drying rack. Careful, they’re hot, so hold them carefully with just the tips of your fingers,” Shion instructed, closing the oven and freeing his hand from the oven mitt. “And I never said you couldn’t ask me any personal questions. Unlike you, I’d be happy to answer.”

            Nezumi stepped forward, watched Shion transfer three scones to the wire rack beside him before he reached out, did the same, flinching at the heat of the dough and yanking his fingers away.

            “Shit.”

            “Careful, it’s hot.”

            “You’re touching them.”

            “I’ve had practice. If you want, you can get started on the next thing. I saw when we were out there that we’re low on pumpkin pie, so let’s get started on that. I’m sure my mom already cooked and mashed the pumpkin during morning prep, check the fridge for a bowl labeled ‘pumpkin filling.’”

            Nezumi did as he was told, peering into the fridge and finding that there were several bowls of prepared mixes. He had to shuffle a few around, finding the pumpkin filling behind the cherry pie mix.

            By the time he set the bowl on the counter, Shion had transferred all of the scones.

            “Want to do crust or filling?” Shion asked.

            “Isn’t this the filling?”

            “That’s just pumpkin, there’s a lot you have to add to it. Brown sugar, eggs, evaporated milk, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt – ”

            “I’ll do the crust,” Nezumi interrupted.

            Shion smiled at him. “If you want.”

            After a half hour, however, Nezumi was learning that the crust was not much easier, and soon Shion was abandoning the filling to help him.

            “That’s too thin, Nezumi, you keep rolling it too thin,” Shion said not for the first time.

            Nezumi nearly chucked the rolling pin at the man. He’d rolled out the dough he’d prepared at least four times, each time earning some criticism from Shion, from the thinness to the shape – _Is that a trapezoid? Pie crusts should be circular._

            The process of making the dough had somehow ended with Nezumi being nearly completely covered in flour, which Shion had informed him was from mixing too hard – _The flour is going all over, Nezumi, try to be gentler._

            “You do it,” Nezumi snapped, thrusting the rolling pin at Shion, who took it only to put it down beside the apparently too-thin saucer of dough.

            “Here, let’s ball it up and try it again,” Shion said patiently, curling the flattened dough up by its sides and collecting it into a ball, which he offered to Nezumi, who stepped back.

            “Your mother was right not to trust me.”

            “It takes time to learn how to bake. You won’t get it if you don’t keep trying again.”

            “I believe I have already informed you I have no desire to learn to bake.”

            “Well, that’s a shame. You look very attractive in an apron,” Shion replied, tossing the dough onto the counter before picking up the rolling pin again and beginning to roll it out in even movements.

            Nezumi stared at him. The man had clearly warmed up in the kitchen, as he’d rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, though Nezumi was still unsure how he wasn’t dying of heat in all his layers. With his forearms exposed, Nezumi could see the professor had incredibly bony wrists. Nezumi had felt their thinness two days ago, in the coffee shop, pulling Shion’s arm to look at his watch.

            Shion glanced up at him, smiled lightly. “Are you going to ask me a personal question? I’ve been waiting for a half hour.”

            Nezumi had forgotten their conversation from a half hour before. Baking was a consuming process. He found it difficult to think about anything but Shion’s instructions –  _Now gradually add water, cold water, just one tablespoon at a time. Keep mixing when you add it. Don’t go over four tablespoons, but you can stop at three if you think the dough doesn’t need more. The consistency is the most important part of the crust._

            Nezumi watched Shion pinch the edges of the dough, as if testing it. Shion acted like he had no secrets. He seemed open, and he clearly said everything that was on his mind, every thought that popped into his head – _Well, that’s a shame. You look very attractive in an apron_ – but Nezumi knew better.

            Nobody was without secrets. Nezumi didn’t know what question to ask to learn Shion’s, and he wasn’t given much time to think, as someone else was speaking.

            “Hey, that’s my apron.”

            Nezumi looked away from Shion’s fingers, saw a young woman in the doorway of the bakery. When he looked at her, the woman’s eyes widened.

            The same expression as Shion’s mother. Shock and fear.

            “You’re from the Gin Dynasty,” the woman said.

            “Safu,” Shion said, almost warningly, but the woman didn’t look away from Nezumi.

            _That’s a personal question,_ Nezumi thought, but he didn’t say it. It hadn’t been a question anyway, so he saw no need to respond. If anything, the woman’s words had sounded like an accusation.

            “He’s the man from my lectures I told you about, remember?” Shion said, his voice pointed. “Nezumi, this is my best friend Safu. Safu, meet Nezumi. We’ve been…hanging out recently.”

            “Hanging out?” Safu asked loudly, almost a shout.

            Nezumi raised an eyebrow. There was no need to be scared of Nezumi unless he gave such a reason, but he largely doubted he’d given this Safu any reason at all, just as he doubted he’d done so with Shion’s mother. Their reactions stemmed only from his appearance, from the fact, he could conclude, that he was from the Gin Dynasty. This should not have been a reason for fear. The Gin Dynasty, before it’d been eradicated, had not been dangerous nor violent.

            “I’ll be right back. Try not to make the crust flatter while I’m gone, it’s the perfect size,” Shion said, and when Nezumi looked at him, it was to see that Shion was smiling at him as he always did, like he hadn’t noticed his own friend’s odd reaction. 

            Clearly, he’d noticed. He wasn’t fazed by it. Nezumi tilted his head. Nodded, and then Shion was walking around the counter, heading out the kitchen, grabbing Safu’s hand on the way out and pulling her.

            “Ow!” she complained, and Nezumi heard only half of Shion’s apology, as the rest was cut off when the kitchen door swung closed behind them.

            In Shion’s absence, Nezumi leaned against the counter and looked down at Shion’s pie crust. It was the perfect circle, almost eerily so, like Shion had a secret method for perfecting pie crusts.

            Like Shion was full of secrets, like he had even more of them than those endless smiles of his.

*

“Tell me I’m blind, Shion. At the very least, tell me I imagined that man’s eyes were silver,” Safu hissed once Shion had released her wrist after dragging her upstairs, to the floor above the kitchen and bakery that functioned as the home where Shion had grown up, where Karan still lived.

            He had led Safu to his childhood bedroom and sat on the edge of his childhood bed, watching his friend pace.

            “I think he’s from the Gin Dynasty. He told me grew up in Kyoto,” Shion conceded.

            Safu stopped pacing, looked hard at Shion. “There weren’t any survivors.”

            Shion examined his arm, checking that the foundation over his scar hadn’t rubbed off. “I guess there was,” he said to his arm.

            “Let me get this straight. You invited the one secret survivor of the Great Slaughter to come over and bake with you? You’ve been _hanging out_ , whatever that means, with the one man who has more reason to hate vamps than anyone in the world?”

            “He doesn’t know. He won’t find out,” Shion said, glancing up at Safu, who had her hands on her hips.

            “Why are you even taking the risk that he might? Vamps murdered his family, Shion, there’s no chance he’s a vamp sympathizer. I’d bet he’s a Vamp Hunter, and I have no idea why you’d even take the chance of being around a Vamp Hunter willingly, out of your own free volition, without any – ”

            “He’s not a Vamp Hunter, he’s an actor,” Shion corrected. He wanted to lie down. He remembered, suddenly, that he was starving. He wanted to forget again. He wanted to go back downstairs, to be beside Nezumi again, correcting the mistakes Nezumi made as he baked, watching the clumsiness of Nezumi’s fingers over dough when Shion hadn’t expected Nezumi to be clumsy when doing anything.

            “Are you being deliberately dense?” Safu demanded.

            “I know it’s dangerous, Safu. It’s dangerous for me to be around anyone who’s not a vamp sympathizer, he’s not an exception.”

            “He is an exception. Be rational, Shion. A mass murderer is going to be generally hated by everyone in society, but he’s going to be singularly and exceedingly loathed by the sole surviving kid of the innocent family he murdered.”

            “I really hope you’re not comparing me to a mass murderer. I didn’t do anything to the Gin Dynasty,” Shion said, hearing the hardness in his own voice, and he watched Safu’s shoulders fall.

            “No – I didn’t mean – I’m sorry, that was a terrible analogy. But I know you understand. He has no reason to even be neutral towards you. He has no reason to care at all about your life.”

            “If he finds out. Which he won’t.”

            “But why are you taking the chance?” Safu asked, her voice strained, and Shion could see the worry in her, knew she worried for him constantly, knew his mother did the same.

            There were still vamp sympathizers, people who didn’t blame all vamps for the Great Slaughter or any of the other vamp massacres that had occurred throughout history. People who still donated blood to vamp banks, even though to do so was illegal now, even though they risked prison to give a vamp a meal. People who knew that vamps were not uncontrollable, that the inability to restrain themselves from attacking humans for blood was just another vamp stereotype. People who understood that most vamps were not savage, that most vamps would never hurt humans, that most vamps would starve themselves rather than let their own families donate blood more often than was safe.

            Most people were not vamp sympathizers. There were some people who did not actively pursue or hate vamps, though they also did not actively try to help what vamps still survived and were in hiding. A vamp neutral might even discover a vamp and keep that discovery a secret.

           One of Karan’s regular customers was a vamp neutral, an old woman. Shion had known this ever since the day he’d come into the bakery one morning as a kid after forgetting to put on his colored contacts, and she’d screamed after looking at him. Despite her initial shock, the old woman had never said anything about it, and continued coming to the bakery as she always had.

           Shion was not thankful to her. Apathy was not something to be grateful for, and Shion didn’t give thanks to those who did nothing.

            But the majority of humans were neither sympathizers nor neutral. The majority of humans would call a Vamp Hunter in an instant on discovering a vamp, and Shion understood what Safu was saying, understood her panic fully.

            It was hardly a question that Nezumi would be in the majority category. It was likely that he was an extremist vamp hater, that he would not settle for vamps simply being merely isolated or imprisoned but wanted them exterminated.

            Shion knew this. He fully understood this. He was not in denial, and he needed Safu to know this too.

            “I know you’re right. I know I’m being an idiot. I know I shouldn’t be near him, I shouldn’t give him the chance to look too closely at me, to notice that I don’t eat. I know, Safu, I know all of that, do you think I could forget that?”

            Safu sat on the bed beside Shion. “Then why – ”

            “I don’t know! I like him. Safu, I like him, that’s my reason, and I know how it sounds, but I don’t know what to do about it. I like him in a way that I can’t make sense of. I barely know him, and I’m risking everything, and I know I must sound so foolish to you, so terrible after everything you and Mom have done to keep me safe, but I can’t help it. I’m happy around him. Real happy. Human happy.”

           Safu’s lips were open. Shion had never seen his friend speechless, didn’t know what to do with it, looked away from her at his hands knotting in his lap.

            “It’s ridiculous, I know,” he whispered. “I have a crush, and I can feel it, the physical reaction of it, like my body is releasing oxytocin and dopamine and adrenaline like any human with a crush. I feel light and giddy because of it, my heart beats faster, Safu, I’m certain I can feel it in my chest. I never was allowed to feel any of this before. I couldn’t go to school ever since they started doing vamp screenings. I never got to be a normal kid, I never got to have a crush, and even now I’m terrified to talk to my colleagues because I’ve grown up learning to be terrified of everyone but you and Mom, so I never got to feel this way. I’m twenty-seven, and I never knew what it was like to feel happy for absolutely no reason, to like a person without even knowing them at all, and I just don’t want to let go of that yet, Safu, I just want to have it a little longer.”

           There was a few seconds’ pause, and then Safu spoke softly. “You’re not terrified of him?”

           Shion dug his fingernails into the skin of his palms. The pain was muted, barely there. “I know I should be.”      

           Safu said nothing. Shion peeked at her, saw that her anger had softened, that there was a crease between her eyes. But at his look, she offered a hesitant smile.

           “It’s definitely inconvenient, but I’m happy for you. You have a crush,” she said, and then she laughed, more of a breath of a laugh than anything.

           “I feel ridiculous around him. I don’t understand it,” Shion admitted, and Safu’s smile was warmer now.

           “He’s the guy you mentioned at the beginning of the semester. The one in both your lectures that you couldn’t find in your photo roster.”

           Shion nodded. “He’s not a student, he just likes attending lectures. His name is Nezumi.”

           “Nezumi,” Safu repeated slowly. “What does hanging out mean? Why didn’t you tell me about him?”

           “I only spoke to him for the first time on Tuesday. We got coffee after my last lecture. Well, he did. We talked for a little, and then he had to go to his show. He’s a theater actor. And that was it. Nothing happened. I had these crazy thoughts of kissing him, and I knew I couldn’t think like that, and I didn’t plan to ever speak to him again, but then today he sat in the front row of my lecture, and I just…” Shion shook his head.

           Safu reached out, cupped Shion’s hand, and only then did he realize he’d broken his skin, that poison was leaking out his palms in the small slits made by his fingertips.

           “I’ll get you a band-aid,” she said, getting up and going to Shion’s desk.

           “I think it’s the way he looks at me. I’ve been making myself invisible nearly all my life. I’ve always had to avoid people, to hope people wouldn’t look too closely at me. But he looks at me with so much focus, I don’t know what to think, I can’t think at all,” Shion admitted.

           Safu brought a band-aid back to Shion, sat again beside him, took her hand in his. “I’m happy you get to experience a crush, Shion. But he’s the wrong person to have a crush on,” she said gently, applying the band-aid, pressing the sticky tabs to his palm.

           “Any human is the wrong person for me to have a crush on,” Shion reminded her.

           Safu looked up at him, but she didn’t argue, and Shion was almost disappointed. He wanted to be wrong.

*

Despite Shion’s threats, the professor did not kiss Nezumi in his mother’s kitchen on Friday. He returned to the kitchen with his friend Safu, and together, the three of them baked until Nezumi had to leave for his afternoon show.

            He was tempted to skip his show. He did not want to leave the warmth of the bakery. When Shion and Safu returned, Safu no longer looked at Nezumi with the previous fear. Nezumi did not know what Shion had told her, but she began to look at him with curiosity. She had Shion’s bad habit of asking too many personal questions, which she did as they finished the pumpkin pie, then made pecan tarts, then oatmeal raisin cookies, then lemon cake, then chocolate chip cookies.

            _What other lectures do you sneak into?_

            _Do you act in Kabuki or just straight plays?_

            _Is Shion a good professor?_

            _How long have you lived in Tokyo?_

            _Is anyone else from the Gin Dynasty secretly alive as well?_

At the last question, Shion interjected.

            “Safu! You can’t ask that.”

            “Why not?”

            “I’m not secretly alive. It’s not my fault people just assumed everyone was killed.”

            “Do you have other family that survived, then?”

            “Safu, please stop.”

            “No, I don’t,” Nezumi said, and he didn’t know why he said it, why he was telling this stranger something he’d never told anyone – but then, no one had ever asked.

            Both Safu and Shion stared at him, then, until the timer went off, and Shion nearly jumped out of his skin, going to take the chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. He reached in without oven mitts until Safu yelled at him, reminding him to put them on. And that ended the line of questioning.

            It was a week after Nezumi’s first day at Shion’s mother’s bakery, when he’d hardly thought of it as a first day as he hadn’t assumed there’d be a second.

            But there was a second, on the following Sunday. And a third, on Monday. And a fourth, on Tuesday. And a fifth, on Wednesday. Today was the sixth time Nezumi was in Karan’s bakery, having once again accompanied Shion after his Friday morning lecture. Sometimes when Nezumi found himself in Karan’s bakery, Safu was there. Sometimes, she was not, and Nezumi preferred these times. Not that he minded Safu so much, despite her personal questions. He found her lack of bullshitting and pretense refreshing.

            But he preferred to be alone with Shion, the man who still hadn’t kissed him, and Nezumi had no idea what the guy was waiting for. He doubted he was giving Shion any sort of misconception that the reason he came to the bakery was to actually bake. He was still terrible at it, ruined any pastry he attempted.

            Clearly, he was at the bakery to be kissed – at the very least, though Nezumi couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed someone without it being a rushed and only mildly necessary precursor to sex. Shion, obsessed with evidence and drawing conclusions, should certainly have guessed such a thing by now.

            It was a half hour until Nezumi’s afternoon show. He’d been baking scones and muffins and cookies and tarts for several hours, unkissed and unfucked, and he didn’t have much more time to waste. He was already late – he was supposed to be at the theater an hour before performances. Even so, Nezumi lingered, squeezing lemons for lemon bars, while Shion chattered happily about some promotion Safu was getting at the psychology lab where she worked.

            “Can you cut up some apples when you’re done that?” Shion asked, interrupting himself.

            “I can’t, I have a show.”

            “Oh, right, I totally forgot! What time is it now?” he asked, though he looked at his own watch, exclaimed in surprise. “It starts in a half hour!”

            “Yeah,” Nezumi agreed, tightening his fist around the lemon to take out his sexual frustration. In the entire time since he’d first spoken to Shion, Nezumi hadn’t even hooked up with a random man at a bar or went home with his coworker at the theater that he slept with occasionally. Nezumi had first spoken to Shion on the Tuesday of the previous week. Ten days before. Nezumi was not entirely pleased, and not used to waiting on people. He had no idea why he was waiting on Shion.

            Nezumi dropped the depleted lemon. Picked up another half. It hurt his knuckles to squeeze the halves, but it was more satisfying than using the lemon juicer Shion had offered several times.

            “Well, shouldn’t you be going? I can finish that.”

            “I guess I should,” Nezumi said roughly, squeezing the lemon harder. Juice sprung up, drops catching on his apron, splattering on the counter around the measuring bowl he was supposed to be squeezing the lemons into.

            “Are you angry about something?”

            “Not at all,” Nezumi replied, dropping the half-squeezed lemon half into the measuring cup with the juice and tugging off his apron, which was Karan’s, a light blue fabric that said, “Kiss the Cook.”

            _Ironic,_ Nezumi thought, hanging it up on the apron rack before washing his hands.

            “You clearly are,” Shion said, when Nezumi shut off the faucet and turned to see Shion holding out a dishtowel.

            Nezumi took it, dried his hands slowly. “You’re imagining things. Move, I’m late.”

            Shion followed Nezumi out the kitchen, through the front room of the bakery where Nezumi called out his goodbye to Karan. She returned the farewell, and Nezumi left the bakery, but Shion was still beside him.

            “You’re wearing your apron.”

            “I’m going right back to the kitchen after you tell me why you’re in a mood.”

            “I’m hardly in a mood.”

            “Come over tomorrow, I’ll show you how to make cinnamon buns.”

            “I don’t care about making cinnamon buns. And I have three shows on Saturdays.”

            “Come over Sunday.”

            “I have two shows on Sunday.”

            “You came over last Sunday.”

            “Shion, how many times do I have to tell you I am completely uninterested in baking in your mother’s bakery?” Nezumi asked.

            “You’re not interested in my lectures, but you keep coming to those,” Shion pointed out.

            They’d stopped walking, as they’d reached the subway. They stood to the side of the entrance to keep out of the way of people walking up and down the stairs into and out of the station.

            Nezumi wove his fingers through his bangs. Squinted at Shion, who curled his shoulders, tucked his hands in his pockets. The November heatwave had subsided, and now Shion had a right to be cold, but it was still bizarre that he wore several sweaters and a jacket. Since he’d just come straight out of the kitchen, however, he currently only wore two sweaters under his apron.

            “I know you don’t come to the bakery to bake, I know you want – I’m not stupid. I understand, Nezumi,” Shion finally said, his words clipped, cutting each other off, coming out his lips along with a gush of air.

            Nezumi raised an eyebrow. Crossed his arms over his own sweater. He should have worn a jacket. It would be much colder later that night when he left the theater after his second show.

            “And what is it you understand?” Nezumi asked, when Shion said nothing more.

            Shion chewed on the side of his lip. Looked away from Nezumi, at the people disappearing down the subway stairs, at the other people climbing up them onto the city street. He glanced back at Nezumi, his brown hair blowing over his forehead.

            “I want – I want something with you. I really do. I just have to take things slow. Is that okay?”

            Nezumi uncrossed his arms to reach up, tuck his bangs out of his eyes. He had never done anything slow before. He had never done anything like whatever the hell he was doing with Shion before. He did not think Shion seemed like someone who wanted to do things slowly, and he watched the man carefully.

            “Define slow.”

            “Not taking you to my apartment and having sex with you right now,” Shion replied.

            Nezumi laughed at the serious look on the guy’s face. It did not surprise him at all that Shion would say such a ridiculous thing. “Did I suggest that?”

            “No, but it’s what I’ve been wanting to do since I met you. And I don’t think we should do that.”

            “I don’t see why not. I’ve got an understudy at the theater for a reason,” Nezumi said.

            Shion smiled wanly, a small smile that was nothing like the childish grins he was always throwing about. The man looked tired, always looked some version of tired, but today was one of his more tired days.

            Nezumi wondered, not for the first time, if he was sick. A serious sort of sick. The sort of sick that was often associated with men who said things to other men like – _Taking you to my apartment and having sex with you right now…it’s what I’ve been wanting to do since I met you._

            Nezumi had not yet asked Shion a personal question, despite the frequent number of them Shion routinely fired at him. Shion also offered answers to questions Nezumi didn’t ask – what pastries were his favorite to bake, how he’d never learned to drive, that he had been homeschooled, that he’d seriously considered being an astronaut when he was a teenager, what his favorite color was.

            Useless things, but Nezumi didn’t altogether mind learning these facts that meant nothing.

            “If you don’t want to take things slow, I understand,” Shion said, after a moment.

            _Are you sick?_ Nezumi thought, but instead, he said, “If I don’t get going, I’ll be late for the first act.”

            Shion blinked. Nezumi could see the flinch of his skin when he clenched his jaw. “Okay. Have a good show.”

            Nezumi nodded. He wanted to say something back, but he didn’t know what he wanted to say, and really, it was easier to say nothing at all.

            He turned away from Shion, let the November wind push him down into the subway station. He felt strange, an odd feeling over his skin that he didn’t know what to do with, and he was relieved when his train came, when he got on and was pulled away from Shion, faster, faster, until even if he wanted to, he couldn’t turn back.

*

After Nezumi left the bakery to go to his show on Friday night, Shion returned to the bakery only for another hour, not staying until close as he usually did.

            Instead, he met Safu outside the bakery at seven, and they both headed to the gas station Safu had set as a pick-up point for Shion’s blood supply. He hadn’t had anything to eat since eleven days before, when Safu had brought him water bottles of her own blood. He leaned against her in the subway.

            “I think it’s over with Nezumi. Not that there was anything to be over to begin with,” he told her, closing his eyes.

            “Why?” Safu asked sharply, her shoulder jerking under his cheek, and Shion realized what she was thinking.

            “Nothing like that, he doesn’t know. I told him I wanted to be with him, but that I have to take things slow. Which is ridiculous, because we can’t do anything at all, ever. But I don’t think he’s someone who likes to take things slow, anyway.”

            Safu hummed but said nothing. Shion was fine with this. He was too tired to keep up a conversation. It amazed him that he forgot to be tired when he was around Nezumi, and then the moment Nezumi was gone again, everything hit him immediately. His exhaustion. The weakness he could feel in his body. The dizziness and the gnawing of his stomach.

            He fell asleep without noticing.

*

After Nezumi’s last Friday night show, he was wiping off his make-up in his dressing room when there was a light knock on his door.

            “What do you want?” he called, taking the make-up remover pad from his face and inspecting his eyes to see that a line of eyeliner still remained despite his vigorous rubbing. He sighed, threw the pad in the trash and stood up as his dressing room door opened.

            Shunsuke did lights for the stage crew. Nezumi had slept with him a handful of times since the year before, not with any sort of regularity, mostly when one of the men was bored.

           Shunsuke leaned against the doorframe. “Busy tonight?”

            Nezumi glanced at his mirror again, examined his face, the eyeliner that still lingered, that flat look in his own eyes.

            “I guess not,” he told his reflection, then looked away from it.

            Shunsuke cocked his head. “My place?”

            There was no reason to say no. Nezumi said nothing at all, but he didn’t need to. He followed Shunsuke out his dressing room, through the backstage of the theater to the exit, into the late November night.

            It was freezing, and Nezumi remembered he’d forgotten his coat. He slipped his hands in his pockets, pressed his arms against his sides. He had the sudden desire to be in the thick warmth of Karan’s kitchen, standing by the oven, sweating as Shion chastised him for beating the eggs too quickly.

            Nezumi was left to his own thoughts. Shunsuke was quiet, didn’t ask too many questions. Hardly asked any questions at all, and Nezumi didn’t know why the silence suddenly bothered him. Why it felt strange, uncomfortable, absent of something important, something Nezumi missed.

*


	4. Chapter 4

On Sunday, Shion was crouching behind the bakery kitchen counter in order to squeeze icing roses along the bottom edge of a cake when the swinging door to the kitchen opened with its usual creak, and then there was a light knock.

            Shion peeked up from above the top of the cake. Nezumi was at the doorway. Shion stood up fully, placing his icing bag beside the cake.

            “You’re here,” he said.

            “Show just ended,” Nezumi replied, walking into the kitchen to the sink.

            Shion watched Nezumi’s back as the latter washed his hands, then dried them, then pulled Karan’s apron from its hook and slipped it over his head.

            He turned around to tie it, leaned back against the sink as he raised his arms to collect his hair in a ponytail.

            “What’s with the staring?” Nezumi asked, but he was staring too. His gaze was slowly sweeping Shion’s features, and Shion knew what he was seeing.

            The effects of consuming a proper diet of blood were immediate. Shion had only been eating properly since Friday night after he and Safu had picked up his thirty-pint blood supply, and he looked better than he had in months. He hadn’t even had to apply his starvation make-up that morning.

            “You touched your hair, you’ll have to wash your hands again,” Shion said, instead of answering Nezumi’s question.

            Nezumi looked at him half a minute more, then turned, and the sink was running again. Shion picked up the icing bag. Crouched again, began on the flower where he’d left off. The customer wanted the entire side of the cake to have a design of miniature roses in striped rows, blue and white. Shion was only on the bottom ring, blue.

            After he’d iced three more roses, he was aware of Nezumi crouching beside him.

            “Can I do one?” Nezumi asked.

            “Definitely not.”

            “Rude.”

            “I have an hour to get this done, it’s a special order. Afterward, if you really want, I’ll show you how to do icing roses.”

            Nezumi was quiet again. Shion could have told him to do something else – there were dishes that needed to be cleaned, and even though the bakery was closing soon, he could whip up a batch of sugar cookies for the couple who always came in Sunday nights to buy the last of Karan’s sugar cookie stock for their kids.

            Shion didn’t ask Nezumi to do any of this. He was content to have Nezumi quietly crouching beside him. He could hear Nezumi’s breathing, matched his own to Nezumi’s inhales and exhales. Sunday afternoons were a rare moment of calm in the bakery kitchen. The fridge buzzed. Shion felt warm from the blood he’d drank just a few hours before.

            “You’re not sick,” Nezumi said, when Shion stood up after the first row of roses to get the icing bag with white icing.

            Shion squeezed the bag until white icing kissed the top of the nozzle. Nezumi had stood up too, leaned against the counter. “I know,” Shion said, because Nezumi seemed to be expecting a response.

            “I thought you were.”

            Shion nodded. He knew what he looked like when he was hungry. It was better that Nezumi thought he’d been sick than know the truth.

            “So you don’t have AIDs,” Nezumi said, after Shion had crouched down again, put the nozzle of the icing bag to the cake.

            Shion squeezed too hard, and a glob of white icing came out, some of it dripping down over a few of the blue roses in the row below. “Shit,” Shion breathed, standing up quickly, opening a drawer for the icing scraper.

            Nezumi didn’t crouch beside him again as Shion scraped off the glob of white icing, managing to salvage the blue roses it had fallen on top off.

            Shion stood up again, wiping the icing off the scraper with his finger, then from his finger onto his apron. “Did you think I had AIDs?” he asked.

            Nezumi shrugged. “Evidence pointed to it.”

            “What evidence?”

            “So you don’t?” Nezumi asked, raising an eyebrow.

            “No. I do not have AIDs,” Shion said. It occurred to him after he said the words that he shouldn’t have denied it – this would have been as good a cover as anything. Even so, he didn’t want Nezumi to think he had an STD. Not that it mattered, as they could never have sex, and Shion knew this, reminded himself of this, crouched down again to distract himself from thoughts of this by picking up the white icing bag again.

            “It’s not an accusation, I’m not judging you if you have AIDs. It’d be useful to know.”

            “I don’t, Nezumi.”

            “A different STD.”

            “No,” Shion said, glaring at Nezumi, who was crouched beside him again, watching him calmly. “Just because I don’t want to rush into things with you doesn’t mean I have an STD.”

            “I believe your words were that you did want to rush into things, but that you _shouldn’t_. That’s STD indicative, wouldn’t you say? Besides, that wasn’t the only evidence.”

            “I’m telling you I don’t. I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

            “Then what’s your secret?” Nezumi asked.

            “Why do I have to have a secret?” Shion countered, trying to breathe evenly so he wouldn’t mess up another rose. He didn’t have time to mess up. He was already late. Had worked slowly all day despite his renewed energy. He hadn’t thought Nezumi would show up. He hadn’t thought he’d ever see Nezumi again.

            “Everyone has secrets.”

            “What’s yours, then?” Shion asked.

            “My turn to ask the personal questions, remember?” Nezumi said.

            Shion breathed out slowly through his lips. He’d drunk two full pints of blood just that day, more than he’d drunk in the entirety of two months before Friday. He was not hungry at all. He did not feel anything but sexual desire for Nezumi, who was too close to him, smelling earthy like he always did, a sweet sort of earth, or maybe that was just his smell mixed with the icing Shion squeezed.

            “Slow indicates movement,” Nezumi said, after Shion kept silent, finishing another ring of roses, onto blue again.

            Shion turned the words over in his head as he iced another rose. Still couldn’t make sense of them. “What?”

            “You think we should take things slow. That still implies some sort of forward movement. I think we’ve maxed out the uneventful bakery phase.”

            Shion bit the inside of his cheek. Shifted from his crouching because his legs hurt and kneeled on the tile floor instead. Iced four more roses. Released his cheek. “What’s next?”

            “We can probably skip over handholding, what with being older than twelve,” Nezumi said. He was moving too, shifting out of his own crouch, sitting down on the bakery floor with his back against the lower side of the counter. He tilted his head, watched Shion from his new angle, and Shion watched him back for a second before returning to his flowers.

            “What’s after handholding?” Shion asked the cake. Another flower. Another one. Another one. In his peripherals, he was aware of Nezumi shifting again. No longer leaning against the counter. On his knees on the floor of the kitchen just like Shion. He wore black jeans, and Shion knew they’d be stained with flour when he stood up.

            Nezumi was silent, and Shion finished another row of roses, looked up from the cake in order to switch icing bags again, but before he could reach up for the white icing, Nezumi was touching his chin.

            Shion flinched. Nezumi’s fingers left his skin. He kneeled incredibly close to Shion. Kissably close. Shion had never kissed anyone in his life. His throat tightened. He wanted to kiss this man so badly it shuddered his chest. He couldn’t, he knew he couldn’t. Nezumi might have gotten some of his foundation on his fingers just from the brief touch. It was too risky to do anything more.

            The risk was not for Nezumi. Shion was in complete control, as most vamps were. He was not scared that he would suddenly start drinking Nezumi’s blood, once his lips touched Nezumi’s skin. Another vamp stereotype. Shion could restrain himself from drinking Nezumi’s blood easily. The risk was all for himself, that Nezumi would discover he was a vamp. It was Shion who was in danger, and he knew this, he understood this, he tried to remind himself of this despite how difficult it was to do so with Nezumi so close to him.

            “I have no desire to chase after you. If you don’t want me to kiss you, you should tell me,” Nezumi said evenly.

            Shion breathed. He was certain Nezumi could feel his rampant heartbeat, that it was shaking not only his body but the floor beneath both their knees. “I want you to kiss me.”

            Nezumi didn’t kiss him. His silver eyes flicked back and forth between Shion’s own. “Doesn’t look like it. Want to tell me why you look terrified?”

            “I’m not terrified. I’m nervous.”

            “Want to tell me why you’re nervous?”

            Shion wondered if there was still blood in his mouth, just hints of it from when he’d taken a lunch break. Wondered if Nezumi would be able to taste it, if Nezumi would kiss with tongue.

            Shion had never kissed with tongue. Had never kissed at all. Was twenty-seven years old and hadn’t thought he’d ever kiss anyone in his life.

            “I don’t know why,” Shion said. It was a lie, but Shion was good at lying. He lied to everyone but Safu and his mother. He lied to everyone who thought he was human. He lied to himself, and it was the only thing that made his life bearable. “But I know I want you to kiss me.”

            Nezumi looked at him for another moment. Shion wondered if he’d see them, all of Shion’s lies. With such a careful look, surely Nezumi would see everything about him. See that Shion wasn’t human. See that Shion was nervous, and Shion was terrified too even though he’d said he wasn’t. He was terrified he’d never get a first kiss. He was terrified he’d never get anything that humans got because he wasn’t human, and he was terrified Nezumi would see this so clearly, with that heavy look he gave.

            If Nezumi saw anything, he didn’t show it. Instead, he raised his hand again, touched Shion again, this time just warm fingertips on the side of Shion’s jaw, a touch that was barely there. He leaned forward, and Shion stayed perfectly still. His knees hurt from kneeling on the hard kitchen tile. He wondered if Nezumi’s knees hurt too.

            Nezumi’s lips were warmer than his fingertips. Both softer and firmer at the same time, and wet, and Shion knew that lips were one of the parts of the body with the highest concentration of receptor cells, that this made them incredibly sensitive, and that explained it, how Shion felt so much with such a simple contact, how Shion felt overwhelmed by just a pressure on his lips until it wasn’t just a pressure on his lips.

            Nezumi’s mouth opened, so Shion opened his too. He felt Nezumi’s nose touch his cheek, a contact that surprised him, but he didn’t flinch away. He felt Nezumi’s bangs jostling his own hair, like faint wind. Nezumi tilted his head to fit their mouths in a different way, so different parts of his lips touched different parts of Shion’s. He exhaled into Shion’s mouth as he breathed, a wet heat. Shion was holding his own breath. Felt as Nezumi’s tongue touched his lips. Shion leaned closer to him, knees digging harder into the floor. He didn’t care at all that they hurt.

            Everything else felt incredible. Nezumi’s hand cupped his jaw. Fingers slipped into his hair. Shion kissed back, no longer having to think about every movement. He opened his mouth and closed it when he wanted to. When Nezumi’s tongue was in his mouth, Shion touched it with his own. He couldn’t name the taste of the man other than that Nezumi tasted wet, nothing but wet.

            Shion didn’t have any way to compare, but he knew Nezumi was a good kisser. He kissed in a way that had Shion’s chest constricting. Heat pooled his stomach, lower than his stomach. The poison that ran through his veins became nothing but electricity. He felt the sound come up his throat before he could stop it, and he moaned faintly into Nezumi’s mouth, and Nezumi’s fingers tightened in his hair.

            Nezumi’s other hand dropped from Shion’s face. Was on Shion’s waist. Fumbling, and Shion felt the tug of the apron string against his neck, understood that Nezumi was pulling his apron to the side, and then he felt Nezumi’s fingers slipping underneath his sweaters.

            Shion exhaled the breath he’d been holding. Nezumi’s hand slipped higher, against his bare skin, along his side. Shion couldn’t remember if his scar wound up the side Nezumi was touching. He applied foundation to his scar twice a day, he’d had his scar since he’d been forced to drink the blood of a cow for five months when he was eight years old, but he couldn’t remember where his scar was with Nezumi’s mouth on his.

            He jerked back. Nezumi’s lips were no longer on his, but his hand was still up Shion’s sweater, his other hand still in Shion’s hair.

            Shion inhaled, exhaled in a thick breath. His lips felt odd, raw, throbbed slightly with his heartbeat. Shion pressed the back of his hand to them as Nezumi freed his fingers from Shion’s hair, but he kept the hand under Shion’s sweater where it was.

            “Not slow enough?” Nezumi asked. He spoke quietly. Shion wasn’t sure what the tone of his voice was, if there was any tone present at all.

            Shion lowered his hand from his lips. Touched Nezumi’s arm and pulled it free from out of his sweater, and Nezumi didn’t object. Before he let go of Nezumi’s arm, Shion looked at Nezumi’s hand. He couldn’t see any of his foundation rubbed on Nezumi’s fingers. Nezumi’s skin was paler than his. If there was _Warm Silk_ on Nezumi’s skin, it would have showed.

            Shion exhaled in relief. Let go of Nezumi’s arm. Nezumi stood up, then leaned down, rubbing the knees of his jeans. They were stained with flour.

            “Fuck, this floor is hard,” he said.

            Shion stood up too, having to pull himself up by the edge of the counter. His legs felt weak, and his knees ached. He pulled his apron straight on his body again. He wanted to look at his face in a mirror, check on the scar on his cheek, make sure the foundation was still covering it completely.

            His phone was on the counter, and Shion picked it up. Went to the camera app and switched to forward-facing camera. Examined his face and found that he couldn’t see his scar. He looked for something different in his features, something that changed after his first kiss, but he looked the same. A little flushed, but hardly that.

            He closed the camera app. Saw Nezumi watching him.

            “Texting Safu that we finally kissed,” he said, his lips twitching.

            “No.”

            “You should, it’s a thrilling development.”

            Shion narrowed his eyes. “Don’t patronize me. I told you, if you have a problem with doing this slowly, then just say so, don’t make me feel like shit about it.”

            Nezumi raised his hands. “That wasn’t my intention.”

            “Then what was your intention?” Shion snapped. He felt wiry. He was not necessarily angry, but he felt as if energy was pulsing rapidly through him. Part of this, he knew, was because he was not starving for the first time in a long time. A lot of this, he knew as well, was because he could still feel the warmth of Nezumi’s lips on his. Nezumi’s hand on his skin. Nose against his cheek. The first person to touch him in these ways, intimate and hungry.

            Nezumi sighed, dropped his hands. Picked up one of the icing bags, looked at it, put it down again. “I don’t have a problem with going slowly. I’m just not used to it. I don’t want to make you feel like shit, Shion. This is just new for me, this kind of thing,” Nezumi said quietly, gesturing vaguely, as if to the cake in front of him, but Shion knew, obviously, Nezumi was not talking about the cake.

            Shion swallowed. He thought about apologizing for snapping at Nezumi. He thought about explaining. He was just energized from the two pints of blood he’d drunk that day. He was just energized from his first kiss when he’d never thought he’d have a first kiss.

            Vamps didn’t get first kisses. They died of starvation or they were killed by Vamp Hunters or they killed themselves. Shion had known all of this at a very young age. To have this changed did not feel real. Did not seem possible. Maybe he was angry after all, angry at Nezumi for getting his hopes up, for letting him think he could have what wasn’t possible, couldn’t be possible. Angry for making him want human things when he’d been stifling those wants for so long he’d tricked himself into thinking he didn’t have them.

            Shion took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He didn’t want to apologize. He wanted to kiss Nezumi again. He did neither of these things, settled on nodding, as that felt like a safe response.

            Nezumi pointed to the cake. “Aren’t you on a deadline for this thing?”

            “There’s no way I’ll be able to finish it in time.”

            “I can help,” Nezumi offered, smiling lightly, then laughing as Shion stared at him.

            It was not the same laugh Shion had heard on the few occasions Nezumi had laughed before. This laugh was light, happy, almost like a child’s laugh, and Shion felt fascinated by it, wondered if it was because of him, because of the kiss.

            He didn’t have time to think about it. He let himself look at Nezumi’s smile for another second, then walked past him, to the sink where he rewashed his hands. He dried them, returned to the cake, sighed as he looked at it.

            “I should have made the roses bigger. At this rate, I’ll have to do at least ten more rows, and there’s got to be at least fifteen roses in each row.”

            “There’s seventeen,” Nezumi said.

             “You were counting?”

            Nezumi shrugged. He was pulling his hair free from its ponytail, gathering it over his shoulder. When he started braiding it, his fingers moved so quickly Shion could hardly follow the movements.

            “You should stop staring and ice the thing,” Nezumi commented halfway down his braid.

            Shion grabbed an icing bag. Crouched down again, even though his legs were sore. Started where he’d left off, finding it more difficult to make the delicate roses with his heart still beating thickly in his chest, with his hands shaking from it.

            His pulse didn’t settle until he was on the last row of roses. By this point, Nezumi had stopped watching him, was cleaning the kitchen, had already finished the dishes and the oven and the counters and was sweeping.

            “Down to the last three,” Shion called out.

             “Hoorah,” Nezumi said dryly, from the other side of the kitchen.

            Shion looked up to give himself a break from staring at the cake. Nezumi was stretching, his arms over his head, the broom in one hand so that the top of it almost hit the ceiling. He’d taken off his apron some time before, complaining about being hot, and when he stretched, his shirt lifted to reveal his waist, the pale skin of it. _Porcelain_ or _Snow White,_ Shion still wasn’t sure.

            When he dropped his arms, Shion looked back at the cake. Felt his heartbeat in this throat again. It was another vamp stereotype that vamps didn’t have heartbeats. That vamps died when they were bitten. Shion had never been more alive in his life.

            “You’ll give me the wrong idea with all that staring,” Nezumi called over to him.

            “It’s not the wrong idea,” Shion said, picking up the icing bag.

            Nezumi laughed, and Shion iced the last roses to the sound of it. They were the best roses out of all of them, Shion was certain of it.

*

Before Shion, Nezumi rarely cared about kissing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found any real pleasure in it. It was more or less something to get out of the way, and oftentimes he didn’t bother with it, preferring not to touch his lips to those of the stranger he was just trying to fuck.

            After what really amounted to hardly even a minute in Karan’s kitchen, Nezumi was thinking obsessively about that goddamn kiss. He felt he was going deranged for it. The only thing he thought about more was why the hell Shion wanted to limit things to just kissing in the first place.

            He’d said he didn’t have an STD. Everyone lied, but Nezumi found that it was difficult to doubt Shion. He seemed earnest, like a child who’d never learned how to lie, even though Nezumi was fully aware that there were many things Shion kept to himself.          

            Either way, he was a twenty-seven-year-old man. Nezumi couldn’t fathom why he should have any need to take things slowly. It occurred to Nezumi, as he sat in the front row at Shion’s Monday morning lecture the day following their kiss, that Shion was some sort of conservative himself. Maybe he was waiting until marriage, which didn’t make sense, seeing as gay marriage was illegal in the majority of Japan. The idiot would have to wait forever. Nezumi rejected the idea.

            Maybe he’d had bad experiences. Was shy now, wary, cautious. That made more sense, but Nezumi hated this idea, shoved it from his mind so he could stop thinking about it, but it was not so easy to stop thinking about, and it was a relief when the double doors opened at the back of the lecture hall, and Shion bounded in.

            As he had been the day before, Shion was full of sudden energy. He was the picture of health. He wasn’t even wearing a ridiculous amount of layers, though the weather was cold again, proper November temperatures, and if anything, he should have been colder now than he’d been the week before.

            When Shion reached the front, he caught Nezumi’s eye immediately, grinned at him, then turned to the rest of the class and announced, as if it was some sort of treat, that they’d be discussing trophic cascades and food web stability today, whatever the hell that was. As Shion started rambling, Nezumi found himself tuning the professor out, watching him instead, trying to guess his reasoning.

            The guy could be a romantic. It fit, but Shion had said he wanted to have sex with Nezumi, that wanting it wasn’t the problem. Hadn’t he said that? Nezumi couldn’t remember the exact conversation. It’d been in front of the subway station, that he remembered. Everything else felt like a blur, though it’d only happened a few days before. Really, Nezumi had only known Shion outside this lecture hall for less than two weeks. Still, this was longer than Nezumi knew most people, especially people he slept with.

            Nezumi pinched the bridge of his nose. Slumped lower into his seat, glared at Shion, who glanced at him at that moment, smiling stupidly, of course.

            At least the idiot was happy with whatever games he was playing.

            At the end of the lecture, as always, Shion waited until most students had vacated before going up to Nezumi, and then together, they left the lecture hall. Shion’s Mondays were busiest, and the previous Monday they’d dipped into Karan’s for just an hour to do some quick baking before Shion had to head to his seminar class, which Nezumi didn’t attend, as there were only thirty students in that class.

            “It wouldn’t really matter if you came to my seminar class. I’m the professor, and I’m already aware you’re not on the roster,” Shion said, as they left the lecture building.

            “You think I don’t have better things to do than go to your seminars?” Nezumi countered. It was cold outside, too cold for a casual stroll. He regretted leaving the lecture building, shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Where’s your office?”

            “It’s in that building over there,” Shion said, pointing across the quad. “What better things do you have to do?”

            “I do have a job, you know. I’m mildly famous. I want to see your office.”

            “You’re not famous, nobody knows anyone in the theater. And you’re always skipping rehearsals anyway.”

            “Which means I have to use the time I’m not in rehearsals to actually learn my lines,” Nezumi replied, following as Shion changed direction to head to his office.

            “Why were you glaring at me in my lecture?” Shion asked, once they’d reached the building.

            Shion held the door for Nezumi, who walked through and waited for Shion so he could lead the way.

            “I don’t remember doing any such thing.”

            “You were definitely glaring. This way, let’s take the stairs, it’s only the fourth floor,” Shion said, pulling Nezumi’s sleeve.

            “Hardly glaring. I was contemplating. Trying to figure you out.”

            “There’s nothing to figure out,” Shion said easily. He bounded the stairs quickly, almost running up them, and Nezumi had to nearly run as well in order to keep up.

            “Why the hell are you running?”

            “I like to run.”

            “What kind of ridiculous logic…” Nezumi slowed, letting Shion get ahead of him. He watched Shion until the man turned the corner, was climbing the stairs out of sight, and then Nezumi could only listen to his bounding footsteps.

            By the time Nezumi reached the top of the stairs, Shion was standing at the landing, hands on his hips and out of breath but grinning widely.

            “Are you sure you’re twenty-seven? You’re like a child,” Nezumi pointed out.

            “I’m down this hall to the right,” Shion replied, leading Nezumi, and then they were at his office. He had a plaque on the door with his name and everything.

            “Fancy.”

            “It’s new, I had a different office last year,” Shion said, walking in and leaning against the front of his desk – a gleaming dark wood – still catching his breath.

            Nezumi closed the door behind him. Walked up to Shion, reached out for the end of his tie, pulled it gently. “You don’t usually wear ties.”

            “I felt like it today.”

            “I like it,” Nezumi said, pulling the tie again, and Shion let himself be pulled forward, his face an inch from Nezumi’s, but he ducked his head.

            “Nezumi…” Shion’s hand fell over Nezumi’s on his tie, freeing Nezumi’s hand from the fabric.

            “Professor,” Nezumi replied, waiting, uncertain what Shion wanted, not used to being uncertain what people wanted from him.

            Usually, it was obvious. Even when people had ulterior motives, Nezumi could easily figure out what they were, he could choose if he was willing to give what was wanted from him or if he had no desire to do so at all.

            He didn’t know what Shion wanted from him. He didn’t know if he wanted to give Shion whatever it was, if he even could give it.

            Shion peered up at him. Tilted his head up slightly, then more, enough that their noses touched, and then their lips. Shion had incredibly soft lips. Shallow breaths that fell over Nezumi’s upper lip. Nezumi kissed him back, not used to kissing people softly, not used to knowing the kiss wasn’t going to lead anywhere and wanting to kiss anyway. Not used to it feeling like this, like a kiss could be everywhere, like all of his skin was hot from it. Not used to wanting someone who did not want him in the same way.

            It was usually the opposite. It worried Nezumi to know he wanted more than Shion would offer him, to know that he wanted too much, and he pulled back first, wary of taking more than Shion was willing to give.

            Nezumi never had to think so hard about sex. It was simple, when many things were not. It had always been simple. People were easy to figure out until Shion.

            Shion leaned forward, breaking the distance Nezumi had made, kissing him again but not long enough for Nezumi to even part his lips, to even kiss back. When Shion broke the kiss, his hard exhale coated Nezumi’s lips where his own had just been.

            “It’s a bad idea,” Shion said, his head tilted down so Nezumi couldn’t see his eyes.

            “Can you tell me why?” Nezumi spoke quietly to match Shion’s volume.

            “I can’t.”

            Nezumi waited until Shion looked up at him. He could see the edges of Shion’s contact lenses.

            “What do you want from me?” Nezumi still spoke softly. He didn’t ask to make Shion feel like shit. He asked because he needed to know.

            Shion’s lips parted. He said nothing for several seconds, and then he stepped back from Nezumi. “Nothing,” he said, hardly even a whisper, a breath more than anything.

            Nezumi knew this was a lie. He knew when people wanted something from him. He knew what it looked like, and it looked like Shion, who stared at him still.

            Maybe Shion was in the closet. Maybe he was secretly married. Maybe he’d never been with a man before. Maybe he was dying. Maybe he had a fetish he was ashamed of. Maybe he was impotent.

            Nezumi didn’t want to think about it any longer, whatever was going on in Shion’s head. He didn’t care if Shion had secrets, but he wasn’t a fan of games. They were tedious and pointless, and he wasn’t about to play them with some guy he barely knew to begin with.

            “You should tell me if you don’t want anything to do with me.”

            Shion sighed. “I like you,” he said, almost as if the fact tired him.

            “Just not sexually.”

            “That’s not true,” Shion said, defensive, like he had any right to be.

            “Not jumping into having sex is one thing, Shion, but a goddamn kiss – ”

            “Look, I’m sorry – ”

            “I don’t want you to be sorry,” Nezumi interrupted. “You don’t owe me anything. I barely know you, and if you’ve got some complicated system going on, that’s perfectly fine for you, but I’m not interested in having to guess what the hell you want from me. If you just need to wait a little, if you need to take it slow, fine, just say so, I’m willing to try that. If you aren’t into sex at all, then tell me that. Don’t leave me here to either feel like I’m pressuring you or making an ass out of myself. I told you already I have no desire to chase you. We don’t know each other. There’s no reason to keep this going if we both want different things.”

            “What do you want?” Shion asked, more quietly now.

            Nezumi strung his fingers through his bangs. Pulled them briefly, let them go. “I don’t know, Shion. I haven’t done a relationship, and if that’s what you want, you’re really not making it easy.”

            “Do you want a relationship?”

            “Like I said, I barely know you.”

            Shion stared at Nezumi for half a minute. “We could…be friends,” he finally said, his voice flat.

            Nezumi laughed. The guy really said the most unexpected bullshit. “Right, that does sound like fun.”

             “I’m not joking.”

             “Do you recall that on only the second day I ever spoke to you, you were asking me if I was single and warning me you might kiss me?”

            “Well, we kissed, right? So now that’s done with, and we can just be friends,” Shion said, like he was attempting to convince himself.

            “I hope you realize being your friend, as lovely as that seems, was not at all the reason I came to your lectures.”

            “I do realize that,” Shion said, and Nezumi waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He wasn’t grinning. He watched Nezumi almost warily.

            “So that’s it then? You’re serious?”

            Nezumi could see the rise of Shion’s chest when he inhaled. “This is what I want. It’s up to you.”

            Nezumi shook his head, almost wanted to laugh again. “Up to me, is that right?”

            Nezumi knew despite what the guy said, friendshipwas not what Shion wanted. He knew Shion was lying, had no idea why but hardly cared, planned to tell Shion he could find a friend elsewhere, but then a shift in the man’s expression stopped him.

            The professor’s eyes slid down from Nezumi’s. There was a light crease between his eyebrows. It didn’t look at all like the same face that had housed so many stupid grins.

             “I’m sorry, Nezumi. I just – ”

            “I guess we’re friends now,” Nezumi interrupted, and Shion glanced up again.

            “I know it’s not what you want.”

            _It’s not what you want either,_ Nezumi thought, but he didn’t bother saying it. He hardly knew the man, but he was aware that Shion was stubborn. If he was going to insist on some ridiculous chaste friendship for some stretch of time, Nezumi could attempt it. If it kept away that sad look, he could try it out for just a little.

             “Don’t flatter yourself, you’re not such a great kisser that I can’t survive without it. What I was after all along anyway were the baking lessons.”

            Shion stared at him, then smiled, a weak smile, unconvinced. Not the right smile. Nezumi glanced away from it, looking around Shion’s office instead.

            “No plaques on the walls. I’m surprised you don’t have awards for teaching excellency or having the most amount of useless knowledge on cell reproduction.”

            “I do, I just don’t have them displayed,” Shion said quietly.

            “You should get them up there. If your students come in here and see the lack of accolades, you’ll lose face. They won’t trust another word you say regarding the fossil record any longer.”

            “You don’t have to be my friend, you know. I’d understand, really.”

            Nezumi had walked around Shion, was opening drawers of his desk, looking into them, finding nothing interesting at all. He was unsure what to do now that they were just friends. Nezumi had no idea what friends did. “Don’t worry, professor. I’m not the kind of person who bothers doing what I don’t want to do.”

            “I’m serious. You can’t flirt with me. It’ll make things more difficult.”

            Nezumi looked up from the stapler he’d extracted from Shion’s desk. “You think you’re really irresistible, don’t you? What could possibly give you that impression? Certainly not your looks.”

            Shion had turned around so he could watch Nezumi. “I just need to make sure we’re on the same page.”

            Nezumi threw the stapler back in the bottom drawer of Shion’s desk, nudged the drawer closed with the toe of his boot. “I’ll do my best not to flirt with you, professor.”

            Shion frowned. “That includes calling me professor.”

            “That’s not flirting. If it is, you’re in for a few lawsuits. I’ve sat in your lectures, I know what your students call you.”

            “From you, it’s flirting.”        

            “I promise you, it’s not,” Nezumi countered, turning to examine Shion’s plants that were on the windowsill behind his desk.

            “To me, it is.”

            Nezumi pinched a leaf, accidentally tore it off the stalk of a plant. He winced, curled his fingers to conceal it in his palm. “You’re being difficult, you know that?”

            “Did you just break my plant?”         

            “Does that count as flirting too?”

            “I’m not going to change my mind. This isn’t something to wait out. I know I gave conflicting signals. I know I said I wanted things before, and now I’m saying I don’t, and I know it sounds like I have no idea what I want. But I’m serious, I made this decision and I’m sticking to it, we can’t have anything more than friendship, and that’s not going to change.”

            “Stop giving me speeches,” Nezumi replied sternly, pointing the plant leaf at Shion, realizing what he was doing and quickly pocketing it. “I told you that I’m fine with it, and unlike you, I’m not so prone to lying. As you know, I’d rather you weren’t so inclined on being hands-off, but that’s not for me to decide, and I’m not going to fight you over it. So unless you’ve got something new to say, don’t bother, I don’t like when people repeat themselves. I’m not a patient person, and as your friend, I’m advising you not to keep getting on my nerves.”

            Shion exhaled loudly. He chewed on his lip, then nodded. “Okay. Okay, you’re right. I’m done.”

            He still looked unsure, but Nezumi felt the same way. Unsure why he’d just agreed to be this guy’s friend. Nezumi had never had a friend. Certainly didn’t need one. If he did have one, he wouldn’t have made this guy his first choice. He’d have gone for someone less annoying. He’d have picked someone much less kissable.

            Nezumi wrapped his fingers around the leaf in his pocket. Was considering telling Shion that he was right after all, Nezumi wasn’t interested in this nonsensical proposition, but he didn’t get the chance to say anything, as there was a knock on the door.

            “Professor?” said some timid voice from outside of it.

            Nezumi pointed at the door. “You want to tell her off for the flirting, or should I?”

            “Shh,” Shion hissed, giving Nezumi a warning look before going to the door and opening it. “Oh, hi, Yume, come on in. Nezumi was just stepping out.”

            “Yume, always a pleasure,” Nezumi told the girl after walking around Shion’s desk and heading past her out the door. “Bye, professor.”

            He smiled at the student, whom he recognized from the front row of Shion’s Ecology and Evolution lecture. The girl gave him a wide-eyed look, but Nezumi only bothered looking at her for a moment before he turned to Shion, who gave him another glare before Nezumi closed the door behind him.

            Nezumi peered down the hallway, already forgetting which way Shion had led them. He picked one way and walked down it, seeing that it was the right way when he found the staircase.

            Nezumi took the stairs slowly. He thought about how Shion had run up them, fast and excited for no reason Nezumi could understand. He thought about when he’d reached the top of the stairs, seeing Shion there out of breath, grinning like an idiot. He thought about closing the door to Shion’s office, how much he’d wanted to kiss Shion, how he’d never wanted to kiss anyone the way he wanted to kiss Shion, and he couldn’t make sense of it, what it was about Shion, why kissing felt like something Nezumi had never given enough credit until the professor.

            At the bottom of the stairs, Nezumi was again lost, went down a wrong hallway and then turned around, finally found the exit of Shion’s office building. Outside, the air was cool and brisk, but the sun was sharp, and Nezumi tilted his face up to it.

            As he walked away from the building, Nezumi thought about how easy it would be to never see Shion again. His life could return to normal. He wondered if he wanted that – normal. He wondered if he’d ever wanted it, what he might want instead.

*


	5. Chapter 5

Shion was sticking his hand in the oven when Nezumi grabbed his wrist.

            “Oven mitt, professor, I won’t remind you again. If you burn yourself you might actually learn.”

            Shion took the mitt Nezumi held out, pulled it over his hand before reaching back into the oven, rearranging the three cakes that were already on the shelves so Nezumi could fit in a fourth.

            “Go take a break, have you eaten anything today?” Nezumi asked, after Shion closed the oven and returned to the cupcakes he was icing.

            “I’m fine, I’m used to handling rushes,” Shion said, just as Safu stuck her head through the swinging door.

            “Need those cupcakes, Shion.”

            “Has he eaten anything today?” Nezumi asked Safu.

            “He’s fine, he’s used to handling rushes,” Safu replied, then disappeared again.

            “Did you two rehearse that?”

            Shion put down the icing bag. “They’re done, can you take these up front? I need to check on the carrot cake.”

            Nezumi took the cupcakes, and when he was out of the kitchen, Shion took out his phone, checked with the camera app that his foundation was holding up with his sweat even though he already knew it was waterproof.

            Shion was extra cautious when Nezumi was around, which was often now – though Shion still could hardly believe it. He hadn’t expected Nezumi to actually have meant it when he agreed to be friends, but it’d been over a month since Shion made the decision in his campus office, and now it wasn’t even a debate. They were friends. Shion saw Nezumi nearly every day, whether at his lectures or the bakery. Especially in the previous weeks, as Karan’s bakery had been hit by the Christmas rush, Nezumi had been stopping by the bakery even when Shion wasn’t there to help out in the kitchen. The actor still couldn’t bake anything without being guided through each step, but he wasn’t the disaster he had been before. Karan had even started giving him lessons when the front wasn’t busy, as did Safu when she was around.

            Today was New Year’s Eve, one of the busiest days of the year for the bakery. Another look at his phone told Shion it was just past seven in the afternoon. Nezumi had been in the bakery since opening, surprising Shion, who knew the man did not enjoy waking early. He’d been snacking on pastries all day, sneaking handfuls of chocolate chips when he thought Shion wasn’t looking, swiping sugar cookies and muffins when Shion’s back was turned. Shion didn’t mind, but he hadn’t even thought about the fact that he himself hadn’t eaten since waking at dawn and drinking his daily pint of blood before coming to the bakery. He’d forgotten that the risk of being around Nezumi for too long periods of time was that the man would notice his eating habits – or lack of.

            “Hey, I thought you were taking out the carrot cake,” Nezumi said, returning through the swinging door, walking quickly past Shion to the oven. He grabbed the oven mitt from the counter, and Shion listened to the pan sliding against the shelf of the oven. “Move, professor, hot cake here.”

            Shion slid out of the way, watched Nezumi set the carrot cake on the counter before closing the oven, sliding off his mitt. Nezumi worked naturally, happily, his ponytail loose, his bangs falling over his eyes as he stuck a butter knife in the sides of the pan to free the carrot cake.

            “You going to stare or bring that cooling rack over here?” he asked, not looking up from the cake.

            Shion kept staring. It amazed him frequently, to be around Nezumi, to be allowed to be the man’s friend. He wanted more, of course, and there were moments when this want was unbearable, but more than anything Shion was so grateful that this man had chosen his lectures to sit in on. His life had changed since Nezumi had been in it.

            Shion no longer felt as if he was missing out on anything. He no longer felt as if his life was less than a human’s. If anything, he wondered often if his life was better than most people’s because he had Nezumi.

            It helped, Shion knew, that he now had a steady blood supply with the online supplier Safu had found for him. Their blood was cheap enough that he could afford a pint a day, and they were always in stock when he made orders. Shion didn’t feel like a vampire anymore. He wasn’t starving, and he wasn’t isolated. He was happy.

            The snap of Nezumi’s fingers in front of Shion’s face had Shion flinching.

            “Hey, what did I say about that cooling rack? You’re zoning out because you didn’t eat, what did I tell you? You’re too skinny, you know, and I don’t enjoy being worried about people other than myself, so eat something every once in a while, will you?”

            “Sorry, here.” Shion got the cooling rack from the shelf behind him, placed it on the counter so Nezumi could transfer the carrot cake, but Nezumi seemed to have forgotten the cake, as he was peering at Shion closely.

            “You know, I was just about to suggest you steal a bite of your favorite pastry, but I don’t even know what that is. I know your favorite constellation. Your favorite time of day. Your favorite season. Your favorite font for your students to use on their essays. You spout pointless facts about yourself constantly, but I don’t know your favorite thing to eat at your mother’s bakery.”

            Shion reached out for the carrot cake himself, making sure to put on oven mitts first. A hot pan wouldn’t burn him, but Nezumi would notice that, and he was definitely aware of this particular vamp stereotype – which was not a stereotype, but a fact.

            Vamps were impervious to fire, to any type of heat.

            “I don’t like sweets,” Shion replied easily, sticking the butter knife Nezumi had used in the side of the pan again, tilting up the cake.

            “What do you like?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “What’s your favorite food?”

            “What’s yours?” Shion countered.

            “I don’t have one. But you do. You have a favorite t-shirt. You have a favorite mixing spoon. You have a favorite type of sponge.”

            “The ones with the soft sponge on one side and the scrubbing pad on the other are just the most effective,” Shion said defensively.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. “Is this something I need to worry about?”

            Shion couldn’t figure out his friend’s expression. “What?”

            “If you have an eating disorder, you should get help for that.”

            Shion was aware he was gaping, and quickly turned back to the carrot cake. “Nezumi, please stop diagnosing me. You’re terrible at it.”           

            “Prove it.”

            “Prove what?”

            “That you don’t have an eating disorder. We’ll be here all night, so tomorrow, eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner with me.”

            Shion tipped the cake pan over too hard, and the carrot cake tumbled out onto the counter, missing the cooling rack.

            “We’re not dating. I’m not going on dates with you.”

            “Who said they’re dates? Friends eat together. Safu can come, I’d be happy if she did, I don’t need you flirting with me,” Nezumi replied easily, picking up the carrot cake, righting it on the cooling rack.

            “If I did have an eating disorder, this would be a terrible thing to do to me. It’d be psychologically damaging to make me sit with you and eat three big meals.”

            Nezumi leaned closer to Shion, staring hard at him. “Are you admitting it?”

            Shion pushed the man away by his shoulder. “Of course not! I don’t have an eating disorder!” Shion shouted, just as Safu came through the swinging door again.  

            She glanced at Shion, then Nezumi. “Am I interrupting?” she asked slowly.

            “You busy tomorrow?” Nezumi asked her.

            “On New Years’ day?”

            “You’ve got the day off work for the holiday, right? I’m taking Shion out to eat, come with us so he can’t sneak me a kiss between soup courses, he just threatened to do it.”

            Safu looked again from Nezumi to Shion. Shion swallowed. Did not know how to explain anything to her with Nezumi standing right there.

            “Don’t you have to grade essays tomorrow?” Safu asked Shion, giving him an excuse.

            “He doesn’t, I’m in all his lectures, he graded the essays.”

            “Maybe he assigned more,” Safu countered.

            “Are you enabling his eating disorder? Do you know about it?”

            “He doesn’t have an eating disorder,” Safu replied, her voice hard.

            Shion closed his eyes. Tried to think of some excuse, but any excuse would just make Nezumi suspicious, would just make him think about Shion’s eating habits more, pay more attention, and Shion couldn’t risk that.

            “It’s fine, Safu. Nezumi, I promise you, I do not have an eating disorder, I just don’t like to eat while I work. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll eat all day with you tomorrow. Safu will come too. It’ll be fun.”

            Safu looked at him for a long moment, and Shion nodded slightly until she sighed. “All right, if you say so. Hurry up and put icing on that cake and bring it up front, Karan’s waiting.” She disappeared again, but not without giving Shion another look, which Shion ignored, aware Nezumi was watching him.

            “Help me ice this,” Shion told him, and Nezumi didn’t argue.

            After it was iced and Nezumi took the cake up front, he returned to grab the icing knife from the counter before Shion could put it in the sink. Nezumi rubbed his thumb along the side of it, then licked the icing off his finger.

            “When you’re done that, do me a favor and line those trays with cupcake liners.”

            “How can you have grown up in this bakery and not like sweets?” Nezumi asked.

            “I guess I ate too much when I was little and got sick of it,” Shion replied, getting the cupcake liners out himself.

            “You can’t get sick of your mother’s pastries.”

            “Apparently, I can.”

            Nezumi was silent for long enough for Shion to look up from the cupcake liners. Nezumi was watching him carefully, his thumb still in his mouth.

            “Are you going to wash your hands and help me?” Shion asked, after letting Nezumi look at him another moment.

            “I guess so,” Nezumi said, and then dropped his hand from his lips and walked past Shion to the sink.

            Shion exhaled the breath he’d been holding when Nezumi turned on the faucet, the running water covering the sound of his relief that whatever Nezumi saw when he looked at him as carefully as he always did still wasn’t the truth.

*

It was seven minutes to midnight when Nezumi took out the final bag of trash to the dumpster outside and returned to the bakery, locking the doors behind him after he entered.

            Karan, Shion, and Safu were slumped in chairs in the front room, which was sparkling clean. They’d been cleaning since they’d closed at eleven – late for Karan’s bakery, but New Years’ Eve was apparently a big day for cakes and cupcakes, and Karan’s specials and holiday sales kept them busy until they’d turned the Open sign on the window to Closed.

            Nezumi fell into a chair beside Shion, lifting his legs to rest them on Shion’s lap. He’d been up since the insane hour of five in the morning because Karan opened her bakery at the crack of dawn, and he knew Shion and his mother had been up even earlier, doing prepwork.

            “Get off, Nezumi,” Shion complained, pushing his legs weakly.

            “Stop pushing me,” Nezumi told him, leaving his legs where they were, and as he’d guessed, Shion sighed and gave up pushing him.

            “Oh, it’s almost midnight!” Karan said, jumping up from the table with energy Nezumi was astounded she still had. She disappeared in the back without another word.

            “Candles,” Safu told Nezumi without lifting her cheek from her arms folded on the table, as if that explained anything. Nezumi didn’t bother asking for clarification.

            “Don’t you two have parties to go to? Professors don’t party? You don’t party, whatever it is you do again?” Nezumi asked, turning to Safu.

            “You know I’m a psychological researcher, Nezumi,” Safu said flatly.

            “Don’t actors have parties?” Shion asked.

            “Sure, want to go?” Nezumi asked back. He smiled at Shion’s tired look. “At the very least, I’ll be expecting a kiss at midnight.”

            “Safu can give you one,” Shion said back, finally succeeding in pushing Nezumi’s legs off his lap, and Nezumi’s boots hit the floor loudly.

            “What do you say? Make him jealous?” Nezumi asked, straightening up in his chair and glancing at Safu, who raised an eyebrow at him but said nothing back.

            Truthfully, Nezumi had not expected Shion to hold onto this “friendship” nonsense for as long as he had. Definitely not for over a full month. Nezumi had gotten used to being friends, was amazed by how much his life had changed since Shion had been in it, but he could easily get used to fucking the guy on top of that. At the very least, a New Years’ Eve kiss didn’t feel so out of order.

            Mostly, Nezumi kept to his word and didn’t flirt with the professor, but Shion made it difficult. It certainly didn’t help that Nezumi had not had sex with anyone in over a month. He wasn’t sure why he was waiting on Shion. He wasn’t sure how long he’d keep waiting.

            “Why are you giving me that look?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi shrugged, looked away from him, which was easy to do as Karan was returning – indeed, with candles, long green ones that she handed to each of them when she reached the table. The one she handed to Nezumi was longest, clearly had never been lit, but the other three were older, melted down a good amount.

            “It’s our tradition,” she told Nezumi, handing out matches next. “We’re always here late on New Years’ Eve, so at midnight, all together, the three of us make wishes and blow out candles. We use the same candles every year, and now you’ll have one too.”

            Nezumi looked at the little matchbook Shion was passing him for several seconds before reaching out, taking it. He didn’t like candles. He didn’t like fire. He had good reason not to.

            Shion was watching him carefully. Nezumi made sure to keep his expression blank. It wasn’t a secret, what had happened at the end of the Great Slaughter. It wasn’t a secret, what had been done to dispose of the bodies of everyone in Nezumi’s family, everyone Nezumi had ever known, after they’d been drained of blood.

            Maybe it was a secret that Nezumi had been caught in the fire too. Maybe that was the one thing they didn’t know.

            “You don’t have to,” Shion said quietly.

            “Scared what I wish for will come true?” Nezumi asked back, keeping his voice light.

            Shion said nothing.

            “Oh, Nezumi, honey, I didn’t think – ”

            “It’s okay, Karan,” Nezumi said easily. He looked up at her, smiled at her worried expression. In over the month since he’d been friends with Shion, Karan was one of the best parts. The fearful expression she’d housed since the first day he’d met her hadn’t returned, though she’d seemed wary the first few days Nezumi showed up at her bakery. But by now, she was warm like no one Nezumi had ever known. She had smiles like her son’s – easily given – but hers were softer, made Nezumi’s chest tighten in a way he’d stopped minding so much. “Thank you for including me, really, you didn’t have to.”

            Karan looked at him for a moment. Her eyes were not the same shade of Shion’s, but a much lighter brown, when Shion’s were nearly black. Everything about her was softer than her son. “All of us, Safu and Shion and I, we don’t have other family than the people sitting here at this table right now. We’re all we’ve got left, so we stick together, and it doesn’t feel like anything is missing anymore. You’re a part of us now, Nezumi, if you want to be.”

            Nezumi looked away from her. Down at his candle, new and unlit. He wondered how long it might take, to get his to look like Shion’s and Safu’s and Karan’s – short with hardened wax dripping down the sides. He doubted that even after however long it took for his candle to look like theirs it would stop feeling like anything was missing.

            Even so, he appeased Karan, looked up and nodded at her. As unfamiliar as it was, Nezumi understood kindness when it was given to him. Didn’t know what to do with it, how to return it, but he could see it all over Karan’s face, all over this stupid candle he held.

            “Thank you,” he said quietly.

            “A minute to midnight,” Safu said.

            “Will you hold mine while I light it?” Shion asked, leaning close to Nezumi, holding out his candle, so Nezumi took it.

            He watched Shion’s fingers strike the match. It lit in an instant with a hiss. Nezumi didn’t take his eyes off the flame as Shion leaned forward. He heard another match striking a matchbox, another hiss, figured it was either Safu or Karan, but didn’t turn to look.

            The flame touched the wick of Shion’s candle, which had drooped down from some previous usage, stuck to the wax. Even so, it lit, and then Shion was taking the match and its flame away, near his lips, and he blew it out.

            “I’ll do yours,” Shion said, taking another match from his own matchbook, and Nezumi didn’t argue. He had no desire to light his own candle. He held Shion’s lit candle slightly away from him, then held out his own new candle.

            Shion lit another match. This time, Nezumi looked away from it. At Shion. Saw that Shion was looking back at him. The tiny fire reflected in the middle of his eyes, yellowish orange like pupils in the nearly black pools of his irises.

            Nezumi’s throat felt tight. He tried to swallow and couldn’t. He didn’t want Shion to light his candle. He didn’t want to hold Shion’s lit candle. He didn’t want to be a part of this, Karan’s tradition, her little family. He didn’t have anyone and he hadn’t in over twenty years and he didn’t have any desire to replace the people he had lost. How dare Karan try to replace them. How dare Shion try to replace them, and Safu, and all of them, and Nezumi nearly dropped his candle when Shion touched the match to it, but then Shion’s matchless hand was around his own, steadying it.

            “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. Nezumi could hear Safu and Karan counting down, could hear the sound of numbers but couldn’t really make them out individually, didn’t know how long it was until midnight, didn’t know how long he had until he could blow his candle out.

            Shion blew out the second match. Placed it beside the second, which was beside the matchbox on the table. He took his own candle then, let go of Nezumi’s hand. His fingers weren’t cold, but they hadn’t been in a while. Shion had touched Nezumi occasionally, in the time that they’d been friends. A hand on Nezumi’s wrist to stop him when he whisked eggs too quickly. Fingers over Nezumi’s to guide him when he weaved the lattice of an apple pie top. Grip around Nezumi’s arm to pull him when he wanted Nezumi to follow him somewhere, but his hold was always loose, always barely there, like Shion was afraid if he held too tight, Nezumi might break.

            Nezumi wanted to tell this man he wasn’t fragile. He wasn’t breakable. He’d survived worse things than Shion could even imagine. Everyone thought they knew what happened in the Great Slaughter, but they didn’t, really. Nezumi was the only one who knew. The only one who’d seen it all. The only one left alive who could remember it, and so he forced himself to remember for the first time in years, just as he finally could make out the numbers Safu and Karan were saying.

            “…fourteen, thirteen, twelve…”

            Nezumi forced himself to see it, everything he’d seen that night. Blood dripping down lips and chins. Red eyes. White hair. Some of them marked with red ropes or red spots, proof that they’d drank animal blood at some point, gotten sick from it, and Nezumi wished they’d all just died from it instead of stopping after those disgusting scars rose up on their skin.

            “…eight, seven, six…”

            “Remember to make a wish,” Shion told him.

            Nezumi held his candle closer. The flame was right by his lips. He thought about the last time he’d been so close to fire. It’d been even closer, itching up his back while he’d tumbled through the bodies of everyone he knew, looking for his mother and his father and his sister, finding them. Empty bodies like deflated, translucent balloons. He’d checked their pulses anyway. Knew they had no blood in them but hoped for a heartbeat anyway while flames coated his skin.

            “…three, two, one…”

            Nezumi didn’t blow out the fire. He wanted it to melt his candle a little more. Barely any wax even dripped. The candle still looked new, and Nezumi didn’t want that. He wanted it to melt down like Shion’s and Safu’s and Karan’s. He wanted to pretend he’d spent all of his New Years’ Eve’s right here, rather than alone, rather than with no one because everyone had been taken from him, drank dry and then burned to ash.

            Nezumi never saw the point in wishing. Had never made a wish in his life since twenty years ago when he’d wished to find a single heartbeat left among the dead and all he’d gotten was his own. But today, Nezumi made a wish, a wish that he’d always held inside him but never given word to in his thoughts.

            He blew his candle out a few seconds after midnight and wished that one day, he’d meet a vamp again and get his revenge.

*

Nezumi insisted Shion choose what they eat for each of their three shared meals.

            “It could be our New Years’ day tradition, since you seem to like traditions so much,” he said, after confirming their plans before he, Safu, and Shion all bid farewell to Karan and headed home New Years’ Eve night – or, rather, early New Years’ day morning.

            Nezumi lived in the opposite direction than Safu and Shion, so after Shion and Safu dropped Nezumi off at a subway station, Shion asked Safu what she thought about having breakfast at Karan’s, where at least the setting would be familiar, and he knew where the bathroom would be when he undoubtedly had to run to it.

            “Of course that won’t work,” Safu told him.

            “Why not?”

            “He thinks you have an eating disorder. Running off to the bathroom to vomit right after you eat will just confirm that.”

            They were walking home. Though the night was cold, they were still hot from working all day in Karan’s kitchen, and their apartment buildings were only a few blocks away. From the buildings they passed came bursts of music and people laughing, talking, still partying to bring in the new year. The sky was dark, but the street was lit up by lamps and light pouring out from the windows of storefronts, houses, and apartments, and the sliding headlights of cars that passed.

            “I can’t help that I vomit,” Shion said, defensive.

            “Obviously, I know that. I have a plan.”

            “Are you going to share it?” Shion asked, after a moment passed and his friend remained silent.

            Safu glanced at him. The lights of a streetlamp they passed coated her face in soft yellow. She looked tired, and flour was in her hair.

            “Food poisoning,” she finally said.

            Shion watched his friend warily. “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

            “If Nezumi and I throw up too, then we can blame it on food poisoning. I don’t want to do it at Karan’s bakery, or else he’ll think her food gives people food poisoning.”

            “You’re going to make yourself throw up?” Shion demanded. “Even if you did that, Nezumi wouldn’t.”

            “I’m going to put something in our food to make us throw up. I won’t put it in yours, since you’ll throw up anyway. That reminds me, you shouldn’t drink any blood for the rest of the night or tomorrow when you wake up. If you throw up in front of Nezumi, you don’t want him seeing that the majority of your vomit is blood.”

            “Are you serious?” Shion nearly shouted, not referring to Safu’s tip on the blood, but he doubted he had to clarify his incredulousness.

            “If I do it at breakfast, we won’t even have to worry about eating for the rest of the day, we’ll all be too nauseous,” Safu replied.

            As Shion gaped at his friend, she reached out, pulled his arm. “This way, we’re at our street,” she told him, and Shion looked up, could barely even take in their surroundings, too distracted by Safu’s plan.

            “How did you come up with that?”

            “You’re the one who agreed to do this ridiculous food thing, this is the only way to get out of having to stuff yourself with human food all day,” Safu said, looking at Shion sternly like he was an unruly child for questioning her insane poisoning ideas.

            “What are you even going to put in your food to make yourself throw up?”

            “There’s some medications at the lab that were recalled because they caused extreme nausea. I’ll get them tomorrow morning before we meet and ground them up into a powder. They’re not otherwise harmful, they were made to treat depression, so if anything, Nezumi and I will be happy while we’re vomiting.”            

            “You realize you sound crazy.”

            “Do you have a better idea?”

            “You’re not making yourself sick. Or Nezumi.”

            Safu waved her hand. “It’ll be fine, us taking some powdered pills isn’t nearly as bad for our systems as you eating human food. They’ll clear our system, and we’ll be good as new.”

            “The human food will clear my system too,” Shion reminded.

            They were outside Safu’s apartment building, and Safu stopped. “I would ask you if it’s worth it. Doing all this to keep Nezumi around, making us worry constantly that he’ll figure it out, just to be his friend. But I don’t have to ask, it’s obvious, I can see it looking at you right now. You’re happy, Shion, a happy your mother and I were never able to give you, and I don’t want that to change. I know it’s dangerous to see Nezumi and you getting closer every day, but I’m so glad for it, you can’t imagine how much you’ve changed. Vomiting a little bit is a small price to pay for that.”

            There was a loud sound of cheering from an open window in Safu’s apartment building, and Shion glanced up at it, then back at his friend, who smiled at him.

            “Don’t look so worried, my plans don’t fail. Pick a place to eat and let me know, I’ll meet you guys there with the powder.” Safu stepped forward, hugged Shion, who recovered from his shock at her plan enough to hug her back. “Happy new year, Shion.”

            “Happy new year,” he told her, dropping his words against the side of her neck. She smelled of flour and vanilla.

            Shion let her go, and she stepped back, waved to him as she walked backwards. “See you in a few hours!”

            Shion waved, waited for her to get inside her building before he turned to cross the street, head for his own building. He didn’t rush. Despite the late hour, he didn’t feel tired at all, hadn’t felt tired in over a month, and he understood fully that it wasn’t just his steady supply of blood that left him feeling more alive than he ever had in his life.

*

Nezumi was mildly surprised Shion hadn’t chosen his own mother’s bakery for breakfast. He said he didn’t like sweets, but she had savory baked goods as well – breads, cheese tarts, puff pastries, bran muffins.     

            Instead, he chose a traditional Japanese soup shop, some rundown establishment just off Shion’s university campus. Nezumi arrived first even though he lived the farthest, was examining the shop from the windows outside of it when Shion’s reflection appeared in the glass.

            “Morning,” Shion said, his reflection yawning, cutting off the last syllable of his greeting too soon.

            Nezumi looked away from the reflection. “You look tired.”

            Shion hummed sleepily. He looked like he’d just tumbled out of bed, his brown hair in disarray, his dark eyes blinking blearily at him. He wore a t-shirt and jeans, and a light jacket over top of them. Nezumi didn’t think he’d ever seen the guy out of a sweater.

            “Aren’t you cold?” Nezumi asked, watching Shion press his arms to his side, zip up his coat.

            “Yeah,” Shion said softly, like he was only just realizing it.

            “We can go inside,” Nezumi offered, and Shion nodded. “I’m surprised you and Safu didn’t just come together.”

            “She texted, she’ll be late,” Shion said, walking through the door Nezumi held open for him.

            The shop was empty, which wasn’t a surprise. It was quarter to nine New Years’ morning. Nezumi was pretty surprised the soup shop was even open.

            An old woman came out from the back of the shop as the door closed behind them, looked amazed to see people in her restaurant, and frantically told Shion and Nezumi to pick their own table, waving her arms like their seating arrangement was some sort of emergency. Shion chose a table in the corner, and Nezumi took the seat across from him. The tables were low, the chairs even lower, wooden with tattered purple cushions over them that slid when Nezumi sat down.

            Once they were seated, the woman returned, dropped off menus, chopsticks, and squat cups of steaming tea, then left again without a word.

            “How did you find this place?” Nezumi asked, glancing at his shabbily laminated menu.

            “Students talk about it,” Shion said. He had picked up one of his chopsticks and was tapping it quickly on the edge of the table like a child might, looking around the restaurant, but after a quick sweep, he gave Nezumi an abrupt stare. “I don’t have an eating disorder. I want you to stop worrying about me and trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

            “I don’t believe you,” Nezumi replied easily. He looked down at his menu again, tried to read the faded print.

            “I’m serious.”

            “So am I. You think I don’t know what an eating disorder looks like? I work at one of Tokyo’s most competitive theaters. Half my coworkers starve themselves daily, and the other half vomit everything up.”

            The tapping stopped. Nezumi glanced up from his menu.

            “I’m not like your coworkers. Please don’t worry about me, Nezumi.”

            “You’re the one who insisted we be friends. Friends worry, from what I’ve been told.”

            “I’m telling you as my friend, you don’t have to worry. I’m fine. I’m healthy.”

            “If you don’t have an eating disorder, then our fun day of eating together will go by smoothly. Right?”

            Shion frowned faintly. Tapped the chopstick again. The woman, who appeared to be the only one working in the shop – not that there really needed to be any other employee, seeing as no one was there but Nezumi and Shion – came by their table again, and Shion informed her they were waiting for a third person just as the shop door opened.

            Nezumi turned to watch Safu come in, unwinding her scarf as she spotted them and walking briskly to their table. She sat beside Nezumi, which he hadn’t expected, and smiled at the woman.

            “Hi! I’m ready to order now.” She looked at Shion and Nezumi. “Did you guys order?”

            “You just came in.”

            “All soup shops have the same menu. What do you want, Nezumi?”

            Nezumi stared at her, then quickly at the menu. “Uh, the number two looks fine,” he told the woman, who quickly scribbled on her notebook before looking at Safu.

            “Hmm,” Safu said, leaning against Nezumi in order to look over his shoulder at the menu. “The number two is the miso soup, grilled fish, and rice? I’ll have that too.”

            “Same, please, thank you,” Shion said, collecting their menus and handing them back to the woman, who kept writing in her notebook for a moment before taking the menus, bowing, and scurrying away.

            “Why would she have to write that down? We all ordered the same thing,” Safu mused.

            “Maybe she was writing something else down that just occurred to her,” Shion suggested, still tapping his chopstick, and Nezumi was about to tell him he’d better stop it, but Safu spoke first.

            “Damn, I can’t find my other mitten. I think I must have dropped it outside on the way here,” Safu said, jumping up from her chair and ducking down under the table.

            “Safu…” Shion said, looking worried in a way that couldn’t be about a mitten, and Safu jumped back up.

            “Not there! Nezumi, will you please go outside and look for it?”

            Nezumi stopped trying to figure out Shion’s expression, distracted. “Why should I?”

            “Because I’m a lady, and it’s freezing out,” Safu said, her hands on her hips.

            “Pretty sure temperature doesn’t discriminate by gender.”

            “Shion’s only wearing a t-shirt, he’ll get sick. And you’re wearing – Shion, will you stop that annoying tapping?” Safu cut herself off to snap at Shion, who stared down at his hand as if he hadn’t realized it was holding a chopstick.

            “Oh, sorry,” he mumbled.

            “My grandmother knit those mittens for me before she died. I have to find the other one. Nezumi, please,” Safu pleaded, though Nezumi had never known the woman to ask anyone to do anything for her that she couldn’t do for herself.

            He tried to figure out what she was up to. Clearly, she was trying to get herself alone with Shion, which Nezumi didn’t particularly care about. If she was trying to help him hide his eating disorder, being alone with him before the food even came out hardly did anything.

            Nezumi couldn’t tell whether or not Shion really did have an eating disorder. He hadn’t been lying – he had several coworkers who starved themselves or threw up constantly, and Shion had the same sort of look, but Nezumi had seen Shion lie before, and it didn’t look as if he was lying when he denied this. He genuinely seemed to believe he didn’t have any type of problem with his diet, and maybe he was delusional, but maybe he was telling the truth.

            Nezumi had no idea.

            He got up, raising an eyebrow at Safu, but not saying a word as she pulled her single mitt out her coat pocket, reminding Nezumi what it looked like even though he’d seen her wearing it dozens of times.

            Nezumi pulled on his coat as he left the shop, glancing back at Safu and Shion at the table before he walked out into the cold morning. He could see his breaths when he exhaled, and when he inhaled he could feel the chill of the air slipping down into his lungs.

            The morning was quiet, hardly any cars passing by. It was a Monday morning – ordinarily, Shion’s Ecology and Evolution lecture would be starting soon, but the semester had ended. Nezumi didn’t plan on attending Shion’s two new courses in the next semester, which would start in a week. He was around Shion all the time now. He didn’t need to sit in the man’s lectures to see him any longer.

            Nezumi scanned the sidewalk, as well as the road in case the mitten had been tossed by the wind, but the wind was light, and he didn’t really think there was a mitten missing in the first place. He had walked two blocks when his phone blipped, and Nezumi fished it out his pocket. A text from Safu.

            _Found it! Sorry, it was in my inside pocket all along, come back!_

            Nezumi shook his head. Slipped his phone back in his pocket and turned around, retraced his steps. By the time he returned to the soup shop, their soup still hadn’t arrived.

            “Sorry about that,” Safu said cheerfully.

            “I’m just glad the mitt wasn’t lost in the end,” Nezumi replied. “Could have been a disaster.”

            “Could have,” Safu agreed.

            Nezumi reached out for his tea, drank it quickly to warm the chill inside him, then refilled it with the kettle that’d been brought to the table.

            “This tea is terrible,” he noted, after downing his second cup.

            “Oh, absolutely. I have no idea how Shion found this place,” Safu said, taking a sip of her own tea.

            “My students,” Shion said quietly.

            “You look tired,” Safu told him.

            “Nezumi already told me that,” Shion mumbled.

            “What should we do for lunch?” Safu asked happily, clearly over the previous topic of discussion.

            Nezumi looked back and forth between the two friends. It was possible Safu was a morning person, and Shion was not, but Shion had grown up in a bakery. He was used to getting up hours earlier than this. His strange somber look had nothing to do with the hour, but it was very likely it had to do with the food, which was brought to their table at the next moment.

             It was a tremendous amount of food. Each of their individual servings could have fed a family. The rice bowls themselves seemed to be party-sized portions rather than individual.

            “Oh wow,” Safu said, after the woman hurried away from them once the food was deposited. “I can see why your students like it here.”

            Shion was blinking at the array of food. He held both chopsticks limply in his hand now, and when he tried to arrange them in his fingers, one fell loose, dropped from his hand onto the table.

            Nezumi picked up his own chopsticks, clicked them together once but didn’t touch his food. Safu was already eating heartily as if she were starving, taking sips of tea between bites.

            Shion continued to struggle with his chopsticks. He used both hands, trying to position the chopsticks in one, tangling the wood with his fingers. Nezumi forgot about eating entirely, fascinated.

            “Why am I the only one eating?” Safu asked, after a minute.

            Shion dropped a chopstick again.

            Nezumi leaned forward. “You don’t know how to use chopsticks.”

            Shion stared quickly up at him. “Of course, I do.”

            “Of course, he does,” Safu said. “He just prefers Western utensils. I’ll grab you a plastic spoon and fork, I saw them at the paying counter.” She jumped up to get them, and when she left, Nezumi pointed his own chopsticks at Shion.

            “Admit it, you can’t use them.”

            “I _can_ , I just haven’t in a while,” Shion shot back.

            Nezumi leaned back in his chair. Put down his chopsticks to drink more tea. The odd taste had grown on him. “What else?”

            “What else what?” Shion asked weakly.

            “Here,” Safu said, returning, sitting before thrusting a plastic fork, knife, and spoon at Shion, who took them.

            “Thanks.”

            “What else are you hiding?”

            “I’m not hiding anything. I don’t like to use chopsticks, that’s not hiding anything.” Shion stabbed a piece of fish without looking at it, shoved it almost angrily in his mouth. He stared at Nezumi while he chewed, and Nezumi stared back, watched him swallow.

            “It’s not too bad, don’t you think?” Safu asked, looking up at them over her cup of tea.

            Nezumi waited for Shion to eat five more bites, then started eating as well, finding himself agreeing with Safu – it wasn’t bad.

            It was only five minutes until Nezumi changed his mind. The nausea hit him in a climbing way, starting deep in his stomach and rising up his chest, then spreading outward, seeming to affect all of his limbs so that he was almost shaking. He drank more tea, hoping it would settle his insides, but the added liquid didn’t help.

            “I don’t feel good…” Safu said breathily beside him, and then Shion ducked out of sight, and Nezumi could hear the abrupt splatter of his vomit on the tile floor.

            Nezumi pressed his hand to his lips as Safu got up, walked gingerly around the table, and then crouched beside Shion, rubbing his back.

            “Are you okay?”

            Shion groaned. Vomited more. He was bent so low that Nezumi could only see the hunch of his back above the table, the way his shoulders shook as Safu rubbed between them.

            “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, just get it all out,” she told him gently.

            This wasn’t bulimia. Shion hadn’t stuck his fingers down his throat, swallowed any type of pill to get the food out of his system. This was food poisoning, Nezumi could feel it whirling in his own stomach. It didn’t rule out anything, but Nezumi couldn’t concentrate on whether or not Shion really had an eating disorder at that moment, as he was fighting his own desire to vomit, made only more difficult by the sounds of Shion’s retching, and then the added sounds of the woman who worked there noticing what was going on, running out from the kitchens and shouting too quickly for Nezumi to understand her in a language that didn’t seem like Japanese.

            It was another ten minutes before Shion actually stopped vomiting. Safu helped clean up the mess, paid the still-frantic woman with the addition of a generous tip, and half-dragged, half-carried Shion out the soup shop with Nezumi lagging behind. They stopped walking a block from the soup shop and slumped against the wall of a closed mattress shop.

            The cold helped the nausea. Nezumi lowered down the wall, crumpling to the sidewalk, only partially aware of Safu and Shion doing the same beside him. He pulled his knees to his chest, pressed his forehead into them.

            “I’m almost jealous of you, Shion. I just want everything out of me,” Safu mumbled.

            Shion made a sound like a half groan. Nezumi closed his eyes. Nobody said anything else, and Nezumi was glad neither Safu nor Shion expressed any inclination to get off the city sidewalk. He was relieved to stay there, content to never move, with Safu huddled against one side of him, and Shion curling into the other.

*


	6. Chapter 6

Shion chewed the strawberry until Nezumi turned to check the oven, and then he spit the mashed fruit in a napkin, folding it over twice and tucking it into his pocket. The taste of the strawberry stayed in his mouth, but he was good at hiding his discomfort by now.

            It was the end of March. Three months had passed since the food poisoning fiasco – he was still horrified that Safu had actually gone through with it, though mildly impressed that she’d realized Nezumi wouldn’t leave the table once the food arrived, that it was safer to make him leave beforehand and slip something in the tea instead. Even so, Shion didn’t want a repeat performance. He had learned from the ordeal. He couldn’t get away with not eating in front of Nezumi, and food poisoning could only work as an excuse so many times. At the very least, it had to appear as if he was eating, which involved a lot of napkins filled with half-chewed food stuffed into his pockets, which he emptied into the trash whenever he got the chance.

            He was learning what foods tasted least nauseating – breads and bland items – and which were the worst – spicy and sweet items. He also learned which foods were easiest to pretend to eat – bite-sized foods, like berries and small crackers. Larger foods were difficult, as Nezumi wouldn’t believe he could eat an entire piece of toast in one bite, so he had to continue to chew and spit and hide napkins of food for several bites, all while attempting to avoid Nezumi’s watchful gaze.

            It was inconvenient, but not intolerable, and Nezumi had gotten less suspicious as the months passed. The fake eating appeased him, and Shion thought of this as progress, but Safu did not.

            She’d told him just the night before he couldn’t go on spitting food out into napkins. _Maybe it’s time to just ask him what he thinks about vamps. Your friendship isn’t temporary anymore, I guess it never was. You have to talk about it._

            This was a terrible idea. Shion knew what Nezumi thought about vamps. They’d never discussed the topic, but they didn’t need to. It wasn’t a question. Just two weeks before, the news had been on in the living room of Safu’s apartment where they’d been spending a Sunday night after closing up the bakery – Safu working on a presentation for a psychology research panel she was leading later that week, Shion grading essays, and Nezumi pretending to memorize his script, though mostly he was leaning over Shion’s shoulder, pointing out mistakes in his students’ papers, insisting Shion fail the majority of them for simple spelling errors – _If you don’t discipline these lazy kids for not checking over their work, who will?_

            Shion had been pushing Nezumi off his shoulder for the third time when, from the television, a newscaster announced a vamp couple had been found in Greece, living off small blood donations from their human friends.

            Nezumi had stiffened against Shion’s side. Shion had watched him instead of the news footage of the vamps being dragged out of their small cottage home. When Shion gave the television a brief glance, the couple had looked not much older than himself, maybe in their thirties. They were gaunt, reminded Shion of himself when he’d looked in the mirror just a few months ago, before he’d been getting a steady supply of blood.

            The newscaster got interviews from the friends that donated blood, all who insisted the vamp couple never let them donate blood more than a hundred milliliters a month, all who insisted they donated on their own volition, all who were arrested because of this, though of course they’d hardly face the same severity of sentencing as the vamps.

            “It’s wrong,” Safu had said quietly, and even though Shion had known what she meant, to Nezumi Shion had guessed it would be unclear what she was labeling as wrong. It could have been the vamps. It could have been the donators. It could have been the public’s reaction to the vamps and the donators – anger that there were still vamps in hiding, disgust that vamps were not completely extinct as yet, fear that a handful of secret, starving vamps were still among society.

            After Safu’s quiet remark, none of the friends had said anything else, and then the news had changed to a different story. But Nezumi had remained silent the rest of the night, returning to his script, no longer leaning on Shion or trying to distract him from his own work.

            Shion was beginning to learn to make sense of Nezumi’s silences. Silence over a mug of tea late at night was contentment. Silence in Karan’s kitchen was concentration. Silence accompanied with narrowed silver eyes was suspicion. Silence in the early mornings at the bakery, with his sharp features softened and his eyes muted, was sleepiness. Silence with slamming cupboards or the smack of his book on whatever surface was nearest was anger. Silence with a sharp exhale out of his nose was frustration.

            The silence in Safu’s apartment that day, with the stiffness of Nezumi’s body, with the distance he put between himself and Shion, that was hatred, a livid type of hatred, a type that frightened Shion, when he caught sight of it in the flat of Nezumi’s eyes. Shion knew this all without having to ask.

            So he wasn’t sure why he was thinking of asking, that day in the kitchen in late March, with a half-eaten strawberry wrapped in a napkin in his jeans pocket.

            “Nezumi,” he said, once Nezumi had taken the banana bread out of the oven, had freed it from its pan to set it on a cooling rack and already resumed icing the two-tier cake he was working on.

            He’d perfected icing patterns the week before. Had a knack for flowers, made roses now better than Shion’s, even better than Karan’s. Shion didn’t expect Nezumi to look up at him, figured his concentration on the cake would be so much he wouldn’t have heard Shion, as was often the case.

            Instead, Nezumi set down the icing bag. Looked at Shion in silence, a careful look, his eyes taking in Shion’s features one by one – each of Shion’s own eyes, his lips, around his face again. Of all of Nezumi’s silences, this was one Shion received the most, this careful scrutiny, like Shion was something that had to be worked out. This was a silence that meant concentration, focus, and it was Shion’s favorite silence, but the one that scared him the most. One day, Shion knew Nezumi would see it. Would know Shion was a vamp. Would catch it somewhere on Shion’s face that he had forgotten to hide despite dying his eyebrows and eyelashes and hair every week, wearing his contacts, covering his scar, brushing his teeth after drinking his morning blood.

            _I want to ask you something,_ Shion thought in his head, about to get the words to his lips, but he couldn’t in time, as Nezumi was speaking first.

            “Is it still the same for you, professor?” Nezumi asked, his tone light even though his eyes were heavy. Often, under a look like this from the man, Shion felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

            “Is what the same?” Shion’s thoughts were still on his own attempt at conversation. He was thinking about vamps, and it made him wonder if Nezumi was asking if he was still a vamp, as if Nezumi had known all along, as if vamps could ever become human again – which, of course, they could not.

            “What you want from me.”

            Shion leaned closer, as if proximity could give him understanding. “What do you mean?”

            “You told me you weren’t going to change your mind about being friends. I don’t think I believed you, back then when you said it. I was waiting for you to change your mind, but you haven’t in four months, and I won’t wait forever. I’ll believe you now, if you tell me to. Will you change your mind?”

            Nezumi spoke evenly, carefully. Shion had not expected this, felt uncertain, disconcerted now, to be talking about his relationship with Nezumi again, after it’d been so long since he’d even let himself think about how much he wanted more from Nezumi than what he had.

            “I told you not to wait for me,” he managed.

            “I don’t often do what I’m told.”

            Shion could have asked, at that moment, about Nezumi’s stance on vamps. Could have told Nezumi that whether or not they could be in a relationship depended on what he thought about vamps.

            But it was no longer an option to talk about that. Shion knew what Nezumi was going to say anyway – how could he even think he could ask Nezumi about vamps? It would just make the man more suspicious, and he was already suspicious enough. It was a relief that almost made Shion’s legs weak, that Nezumi had interrupted him before he’d had the chance to broach the subject.

            “I haven’t changed my mind. I won’t. You should stop waiting,” Shion said, even though he didn’t want to say it.

            He thought constantly about the times he’d kissed Nezumi – once in this very kitchen, once in his office. He thought about doing a lot more than kissing Nezumi. He had stopped thinking any of it was possible, but that didn’t stop him from imagining.

            Nezumi’s expression didn’t change. He looked at Shion as if Shion hadn’t spoken at all.

            “This is what you want, Shion. That’s what you’re saying. You won’t get pissed at me.”

            “Why would I get pissed at you?” Shion asked, confused.

            Nezumi tilted his head. Remained silent, and Shion thought he understood, a realization that sat heavily in the base of his throat.          

            “You mean, if you see other people?” Shion could barely get the words out without his voice cracking around them, and this embarrassed him. Of course Nezumi was allowed to see other people. It would be better if he did. It would be better if Nezumi stopped wanting Shion, stopped looking at him the careful way he did.

            Nezumi looked at him for another few seconds, then glanced down at the cake he was icing. His expression softened with the downcast of his eyes. His eyelashes were long as if he wore mascara, or fake lashes.

            “I don’t have to,” Nezumi said quietly, like it was the early morning and he’d come to help them open in the bakery. He always spoke in near whispers before dawn, as if his voice only rose with the sun.

            Shion wanted to kiss him right then, taste the softness of his voice on his lips. He wanted to touch Nezumi, at least, had already forgotten what Nezumi’s skin felt like – was he cold? Was he warm? Could Shion feel Nezumi’s pulse as clearly as he felt his own on just the faintest contact?

            Shion didn’t kiss him. He lied instead, made sure he spoke clearly, not only so Nezumi would understand, but so he would as well. He took a breath beforehand, made sure his voice would be steady. “We’re just friends, and I don’t want that to change. So I have no right to be upset regarding whatever you do with anyone else.”

            Nezumi nodded at the cake. He didn’t look at Shion again, and this was a relief, as Shion didn’t know what his expression was, wasn’t sure if he was able to hide from his face the feeling of his chest tightening to the point where he wasn’t sure his heart could beat properly within it.

            But Nezumi didn’t look at him to see any hint of the what was happening to Shion’s heart. He merely picked up the icing bag, went back to making flowers.

            The cake had been commissioned for Nezumi to do anything he wanted with it. In the week since he’d mastered icing flowers, he’d become known for it by Karan’s customers, and orders like this were pouring in.

            _That new baker Karan’s got, he’s just amazing, isn’t he?_ asked the woman who’d come in the day before to pick up one of Nezumi’s flowered cakes, as Shion had rung her up, handed the cake to her in its box.

            She’d opened the box to admire it before paying, and Shion had glanced at it too, but really, he hadn’t needed to look at it to answer the woman’s question.

            _Yeah, he is,_ Shion had said, but of course, he hadn’t been talking about cake.

*

Nezumi went to Shunsuke instead of a random person at a bar. Shunsuke was easiest, not that the men at bars took much work. Generally, they approached Nezumi, but it had been a few months since Nezumi had bothered getting laid. He preferred a route he knew was a guarantee.

            The new season’s play was _Oedipus Rex._ Shion had already seen it twice – he had season passes now, had bought them immediately after seeing Nezumi in _Julius Caesar._ _Oedipus Rex_ had never been Nezumi’s favorite play, but it was the first play he’d ever done where he regularly had someone in the audience there solely for him. It made the play a little more bearable, and even Nezumi’s manager had commented on Nezumi’s lack of complaints.

            Nezumi was out of his dressing room quickly after the play’s end, headed up the backstage stairs to where the lighting fixtures were, and there was Shunsuke, laughing with another stage crew person, a woman Nezumi had never spoken to. He thought her name started with an I, but he couldn’t be sure.

            “Nezumi, how unexpected,” Shunsuke said, seeing him mid-laughter, the laugh lingering on his lips.

            “Good show tonight,” said the stage crew woman.

            Nezumi just nodded at her, and she glanced at Shunsuke.

            “You got the rest?” she asked him.

            “Yeah, have a good night, Ichika.”

            “You too.” The woman – Ichika – walked around Nezumi, smiling lightly at him on her way out.

            “Come here, let me show you something,” Shunsuke said, so Nezumi walked over the catwalk to the small platform where Shunsuke stood, leaning against a railing.

            Lights were connected to the ledge of the overhanging balcony. Nezumi had only been up there once before, when his manager gave him a tour of the theater his first day. He’d pointed to the same light fixture that Shunsuke pointed to now and said – _This is the one that will be pointed at you._

            When Shunsuke pointed, he said, “I’m in charge of this one. Bet you didn’t know that. It’s my job to follow you around, make sure you’re always lit up for the audience to see.”

            “I didn’t know that,” Nezumi admitted. He peered over the railing of the balcony.

            “Haven’t seen you in a bit,” Shunsuke said, his elbows resting against the railing beside Nezumi.

            Nezumi continued to watch the empty stage below him. “I’m here now,” he finally said.

            “Misaki – costume designer Misaki, not make-up Misaki – said she saw you a few times. At a bakery. You got a second job? Why would you even need one?”

            “It’s not a job.”

            “Then what is it? A hobby? Baking is your hobby?”

            Nezumi took his elbows from the rail and glanced at Shunsuke. “Since when did you have so many questions?”

            “It’s called conversation,” Shunsuke said, but he shrugged. “We don’t have to bother, I don’t care. Thought you wanted one, you’re the one who came up here. It’s been so long I’m almost worried it’s an April Fool’s joke, but you don’t seem the type to make those.”

            Nezumi hadn’t even realized it was April Fool’s. “I didn’t come up here for conversation.”

            Shunsuke smiled, just one side of his lips lifting. “Yeah, Nezumi. I get that. I’ll be ready to go in a second, I just need to finish turning off all the equipment. You can wait for me downstairs so there’s no risk of more conversation.”

            Nezumi knew Shunsuke was making fun of him and didn’t care. He went back downstairs, because like Shunsuke had accused, he didn’t want to risk any more of Shunsuke’s questions.

            Shunsuke was right. He didn’t want conversation. Nezumi wasn’t looking for friends.

*

Shion opened the oven, grabbed a pan of cupcakes, and slammed them on the counter.

            “Easy there,” Safu said, pausing in peeling an apple. “And you should really use oven mitts even when Nezumi’s not here. He could walk in at any moment, and you should just make a habit of using the mitts now that Nezumi’s here so often. You don’t want to forget in front of him.”

            “You know, he’s not even touching me anymore,” Shion said, after slamming the oven closed.

            “Who?” Safu asked, blinking. “Your hand is still on the cupcake pan.”

            Shion moved his hand, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t get burned, he couldn’t feel anything more than a mild warmth, so what did it matter?

            “What do you mean, _who?_ ”

            Safu’s eyebrows furrowed. “But – Nezumi never touched you. You just kissed those two times back in November. Right? Have you been lying to me, Shion?”

            Shion waved a hand. “No, I don’t mean sexually. He used to – He’d, you know, lean on me, and elbow me, and touch my back to move me if I was in the way and he needed something from a cupboard, and sometimes he’d touch my hair to rustle flour out of it. Things like that, he doesn’t do any of that anymore.”

            Safu sighed, then resumed peeling the apple in her hand. “Since last week when he asked you to change your mind about being just friends.”

            “I wanted things to stay as they were, he’s the one changing them!”

            “You don’t want things to stay as they were. You want a sexual relationship just as he does.”      

            “Obviously, I know I can’t have that, Safu, that’s not the point here.”

            Safu put down her apple, picked up another. “Then what is the point? He likes you, and you rejected him. More than once. He’s allowed to put some distance between the two of you. It’s rational.”

            “Nezumi isn’t rational. We can’t just start pretending he’s rational.”           

            “Of course he’s rational. He was touchy before because he was flirting with you, and it didn’t work, and he’s moved on. Because you told him to.”

            Shion didn’t bother picking up the icing bag to ice the cupcakes. He knew he’d squeeze it too hard to do a decent job. His hands were already in fists. “Whose side are you on? I can’t have a relationship, remember? I’m a vampire.”

            “You shouldn’t say that out loud, anyone could come back here,” Safu said calmly. She glanced up from her apple again. “And you could have a relationship, you’d just have to be careful not to let him find out what you are.”

            Shion’s hands loosened from their fists, his shock taking place of his frustration in an instant. “Just a few months ago, you were mad at me for even wanting to be friends with him.”

            Safu put down her apple peeler, exhaled hard. “I wasn’t mad at you, I was worried for you. I’m still worried for you, and I always will be. But like you said, that was several months ago. I realize now Nezumi’s just going to be around no matter what, and you’re already putting yourself at risk getting so close to him emotionally. A physical relationship will be another set of risks, but I’m sure you’ll be careful. At this point, you might as well have sex with him if that’s what you both want.”

            Shion leaned against the counter. “Safu, you’re supposed to be the voice of the reason. I can’t think when it comes to him, I need you to think for me, to tell me what’s right.”

            “Why is it so unreasonable to have a relationship with Nezumi?”

            Shion broke Safu’s gaze. He looked down at the cooling cupcakes, knowing that if Nezumi was there, he’d be chastising Shion for letting them sweat in the pan instead of getting them on a cooling rack.

            He closed his eyes. “Back in November, if he found out I was a vamp, the worst he could have done to me was called authorities, or contacted a Vamp Hunter. Now…”

            “Now, he can do all of that.”

            “Now, he can leave. Now, he can hate me, and before if he hated me, it would have been for being a vamp. Now, if he hates me still, even after knowing me, even after – I couldn’t stand it, Safu. I can’t risk that. I could risk being caught, but I can’t risk Nezumi hating me.”

            “Why would I hate you?” Nezumi asked, his voice coming into the kitchen just as the swinging door opened, and Shion felt a startling heat rise up into his throat.

            “Don’t you have rehearsal?” Safu asked quickly.

            “I don’t get paid for rehearsals,” Nezumi replied, walking around Safu to the sink. He hummed as he washed his hands, and Shion felt his shoulders drop, though his heartbeat still shook his body and heat thrilled through him in time with his pulse.

            He didn’t think Nezumi had heard anything. He would have reacted. Nezumi was a good actor, but Shion couldn’t imagine he’d even want to act normally if he found out Shion was a vamp.

            “What’s with the stunned faces? I’ve skipped rehearsals before, it can’t be too shocking. And don’t even try to yell at me, I’ve got a manager for that, and he does a great job. Karan told me to bring out the cupcakes, she said you’d have them iced by now, why are you keeping your mother waiting?” Nezumi asked, pulling on an apron before taking the icing bag from the counter beside Shion, standing beside him to ice the cupcakes themselves – though there was space between them, space that may have been normal with anyone else, but Nezumi never gave Shion space.

            He stood against him, pushed him, leaned on him.

            “I was just getting to them,” Shion said, after he’d caught his breath.

            “Likely story. Why would I hate you?”

            “What?”

            “Don’t play dumb, your voice was so lovingly laced in desperation, I’ll never forget it. Why would I hate you?” Nezumi asked, glancing at Shion between two cupcakes. “Besides the obvious reasons.”

            “What are the obvious reasons?” Shion asked, working to keep his voice normal.

            “You’re annoying. A know-it-all. Stubborn,” Nezumi listed easily, but he smiled at Shion, and it was his usual smile – not the one he gave to customers, not the one he gave to his fans at the theater. It was the smile he gave to Shion, and Shion relaxed completely at it. Nezumi would never give a vamp that smile.

            “Is that a hickey?” Safu asked suddenly.

            Nezumi stopped squeezing the icing bag midway through a cupcake. His hand rose to his neck, to the side Shion couldn’t see from where he stood. “I’m going to kill him,” Nezumi hissed.

            “I didn’t know people left hickeys after high school.”

            “Had a lot of experience in high school with them?” Nezumi asked Safu, but there was a tightness to his voice. He returned to icing the cupcakes, but not before quickly glancing at Shion, who wasn’t sure what Nezumi saw when he looked at him.

            He knew Nezumi was having sex. If he hadn’t known completely, he should have. Nezumi had all but told him anyway. He smelled different, too. Something mixed in with his usual earthy scent. Another person blemishing Nezumi’s skin – their body, their sweat, their touch, their lips.

            “It’s – It’s okay,” Shion stammered.

            “I didn’t ask you if it was,” Nezumi told the cupcakes.

            “You did, actually, just last week.”   

            “There’s that annoying know-it-all personality I was talking about. I wasn’t asking your permission to fuck people, professor, I certainly hope you didn’t see it that way.”

            “Do we have to talk about this?” Shion asked back.

            Nezumi laughed, the sound short and mean. “I knew you’d be pissed.”

            “I’m not pissed!”

            “Is everything okay back here?”

            Shion felt hot all over again at his mother’s voice. She had the swinging door open halfway, was blinking at them.

            “Those cupcakes should be on a cooling rack,” she said, on looking down at the counter.

            “Shit,” Nezumi cursed.

            “It’s not a big deal, hon. I just came to check on them, the customer just got here to pick them up. I’ll let him know it’ll be another five minutes.” Karan disappeared then, after another look between Shion and Nezumi, and then Nezumi dropped the icing bag again.

            “You don’t get to play wounded puppy, so stop giving me that face, it’s pissing me off.”

            “So you’re the one that’s pissed, not me,” Shion said back, but he tried to fix whatever expression he was giving Nezumi.

            “Guys, the cupcakes, just let me do them,” Safu said, pushing Nezumi away, but he hardly appeared to notice.

            “Don’t act like some jealous ex. You’re so ridiculous, you know that? You play the victim, but your life is your own doing, you made these decisions, Shion, I have no desire to deal with whatever internal conflict you’ve got going on.”

            “I’m not playing the victim! You’re the one going around flaunting a ridiculous hickey!” Shion shouted, seeing the hickey now that Nezumi was facing him fully.

            A bite mark from a human. Harmless.

            “Flaunting?” Nezumi asked, loudly, incredulously, and Shion wanted to swallow the word back. “You can’t be serious.”

            “I’m going to take the cupcakes up front, I’d love it if whatever is going on here is no longer going on when I get back,” Safu said cheerfully, and then she left them in the kitchen alone.

            “You don’t get to be jealous,” Nezumi said, his voice hard.

            “Why not? I am jealous, why can’t I be?” Shion snapped back.

            “Is that a serious question, or are you actually stupid? What’s going on in that brain of yours? I really cannot figure out how I’m shouting with you in your mother’s kitchen about the fact that you’re not okay with what I do in my own time because you’ve got some weird complex going on that you own me or some shit – ”

            Shion felt hot, unsteady on his feet. “I don’t – Nezumi, that’s not – ”

            “You’re really fucking delusional.”

            “You don’t understand!”

            “You’re a grown adult. Stop acting like a child who doesn’t want to play with a toy until someone else does,” Nezumi said shortly, and then he tugged off his apron, stalked out of the kitchen.

            The door was still swinging several seconds after he left, and then Safu was back.

            “Saw Nezumi leaving,” she commented mildly, stooping down to pick up the apron Nezumi had tossed on the floor.

            “He’s mad at me,” Shion said weakly.

            “You did overreact to the hickey.”

            “I told you, I can’t think around him! But he overreacted to my overreaction,” Shion insisted.

            Safu just raised her eyebrows, her lips twitching. “Maybe he can’t think around you either.”

            Shion felt deflated. He wanted to run after Nezumi, but there was nothing he could say. There was just the truth, and he could never say that.

*

Nezumi was Oedipus himself, and sat still while make-up Misaki applied fake blood to his face to look as if it was streaming down from his eyes – or, rather, the sockets from which Oedipus had gouged out his eyes.

            “I just can’t get it to look realistic,” Misaki said, frowning at Nezumi.

            “Nobody actually thinks I’m out here gouging my eyes out night after night, you know,” Nezumi reminded.

            “Nobody thinks you're Oedipus either, but it’s your job to make them think that for a few hours each show, just like it’s my job to make them think you’re out here gouging your eyes out night after night. Let me do my job, Nezumi,” Misaki snapped.

            Nezumi raised his eyebrows but stayed quiet. It was not currently a night where he and Misaki were attempting to convince an audience that he’d gouged his eyes out. It was noon, in the middle of the rehearsal Nezumi had been intending to skip by going to the bakery, but Shion had pissed him off too much, and he’d found himself back at the theater. He was only rehearsing the first act for five minutes before Misaki had pulled him off stage, insisting she needed to figure out how to get his make-up right.

            Misaki rubbed a make-up remover pad over a portion of Nezumi’s face, then applied more make-up where she’d just removed it. Nezumi didn’t move, letting Misaki lean close to him – close enough to kiss – as she scrutinized her work, added more fake blood here and there. He could feel her breaths on his face, and she smelled minty. Her exhales were soft, as if she was barely breathing, holding her breath just to get Nezumi’s make-up right.

            She rested the bottom of her palm on Nezumi’s face while she applied make-up, so Nezumi could feel the flinch of her hand when there was a hard knock on Nezumi’s dressing room door.

            “Fuck, I just messed it all up!” Misaki shouted, taking her hand from Nezumi’s face, who turned in his chair to see the manager coming in.

            “What are you doing? Why aren’t you rehearsing? The one time you actually show up to rehearsal – a half hour late, don’t think I didn’t notice – and you can’t bother reading your fucking lines?”

            “Ask Misaki,” Nezumi replied.

            “We need him rehearsing, do his make-up later.”

            “I need him now, you can rehearse later!” Misaki shouted back.

            “I’m in charge here, who do you think you’re talking to?” the manager demanded. His name was Kage, but Nezumi wasn’t sure that he’d ever heard anyone call him that. The cast referred to him simply as “the manager,” which Nezumi preferred. It fit better than a name – Nezumi wasn’t sure the manager ever left the theater at all, nor slept, nor had thoughts unrelated to whatever play they were putting on.

            “I think I’m talking to my boss, who hired me to make Nezumi look like he’s just stabbed out his eyes. Look at him! Does that look like a man who’s gouged his eyes out to you?” Misaki yelled.

            Kage stared at Nezumi, then frowned. “Fine. Get it right, then send Nezumi out again. I want him for the second act, we’re starting that in twenty minutes.”

            The manager left Nezumi’s dressing room with a slam of the door, and from behind it, Nezumi could hear him asking someone – “Who the hell are you? This is a closed rehearsal!”

            “Twenty minutes?” Misaki asked, loudly enough to drown out the response of whoever was outside the door getting shouted at by Kage. “He puts me on a deadline? I’d like to see him do your make-up, it’s not easy, you know.”

            She grabbed Nezumi’s chin, turned his face back to her, and Nezumi let her, didn’t jerk out of her grip as he might have years before. Misaki had been doing Nezumi’s make up since he’d been hired ten years before when he was only seventeen years old, though she was even younger than him.

            “Making someone like you look desperate and agonized, how does he think that’s easy? Turning your natural beauty into something ugly, yeah, like that’s a piece of cake. If I had his ugly mug to work with, then I’d only need twenty minutes. Less than that,” Misaki muttered.

            Nezumi was used to her muttering. Misaki was known around the cast for her temper. She was the only one at the theater who seemed to get into more fights with the manager than Nezumi himself.

            There was another knock on the door, this time much softer, but Misaki’s rage was no less severe.

            “Don’t you dare interrupt me again, or I’ll take out your eyes for real!” Misaki shouted, but Nezumi still heard the door open, a slow swing.

            “Sorry – I’m sorry – I just needed a minute – ”

            Nezumi swung around while Misaki was still touching fake blood to his face, and her fingers smeared over the bridge of his nose.

            “Dammit, Nezumi!”

            Nezumi ignored her easily, taking in Shion lingering uncertainly at the doorway.

            “Sorry, I know you’re busy,” Shion mumbled.

            “I’m working. I’ll come by the bakery later.”

            “I have to talk to you now.” Shion glanced quickly at Misaki, then back at Nezumi. “Alone.”

            “Who’s this?” Misaki snapped.

            Nezumi sighed. Normally, he’d kick Shion out, especially after the professor had been so obtuse not a half hour before, but the guy looked a little desperate. “Misaki, give us a minute, will you?”

            “If you need to talk, you can talk while I do his make-up.”

            “I’m sorry, it’s private…” Shion trailed off at Misaki’s glare.

            “What, you’re fucking or something? We all know Nezumi’s gay, no one cares,” Misaki said, waving a hand. “Shunsuke might though, but he’s not here.”

            “I – He’s not – We’re not – Who’s Shunsuke?”

            “Will you stop spewing garbage out your mouth and go make yourself busy for five minutes somewhere else?” Nezumi told Misaki, who raised an eyebrow at him.

            “So he is a lover.”

            “If I say yes, will you get out?” Nezumi asked dryly, and Misaki grinned.

            “Maybe.”

            “You’re right, I’m kicking you out so we can fuck. Five minutes should do just fine.”

            “Nezumi!” Shion shouted.

            “Well, all right then, I don’t know why you didn’t just say that,” Misaki replied, gathering her make-up tools and throwing them into her bag. “Don’t make a mess, I’ll be back in five minutes exactly.”

            Nezumi waved a hand at her, and then she left, walking past Shion. At the close of the door, Shion left the doorway, walked into the dressing room, and took Misaki’s stool across from Nezumi in her absence.

            “You shouldn’t have told her we’re having sex, she’ll probably tell everyone you work with.”

            “Why should I care?”

            “How do they know you’re gay?”

            “Is that what you came here to talk to me about?” Nezumi asked, and Shion frowned, looked at his hands on his knees.

            “I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea about our argument earlier today.”

            “What idea would that be?”

            “I know I acted immaturely,” Shion said, and his dark eyes fell to Nezumi’s neck – looking for the hickey, Nezumi knew, but he’d had Misaki cover that up before she started on the blood. “I want you to know what I’m thinking. I like you a lot. I know you know that. The past four months, since I’ve known you, have been the best months of my life, and I’m not just saying that. I truly mean that, Nezumi, you changed my life. But I have a secret, and I know you know that too. If we had a physical relationship, it’d be easier for you to figure out my secret, and I can’t let that happen.”

            It should have stopped surprising Nezumi, when Shion said everything that was on his mind. Still, the guy could sound so ridiculous, Nezumi couldn’t help but be amazed. _I truly mean that, Nezumi, you changed my life._

            What an idiot.

            Nezumi leaned back in his chair. “If I found out your secret, I’d hate you. That’s what you were telling Safu in the bakery earlier today.”

            Shion bit his lip, then nodded.

            “Has it occurred to you that I might react differently than you suspect?”

            “You won’t.”

            “If I was going to hate you, I’d do it already. Whatever skeleton you’ve got in your closet, I really don’t care. The past is the past, it has nothing to do with me.”

            “It’s not the past. It’s right now, Nezumi.”

            Nezumi smirked at the professor. He looked so worried, so hopeless; it was just like him to get worked up over nothing.

            “You’re not the type of person I’d bother hating. Really, you shouldn’t flatter yourself to think you could be capable of anything that would make me hate you. You don’t have it in you.”

            Shion just looked at him, then his shoulders dropped. “I don’t need you to believe me, Nezumi. I just want you to know, that’s why we can’t be more than friends. It has nothing to do with how I feel about you, and I don’t want you to leave my life. I’ve become selfish since I’ve met you. I won’t let you grow distant from me.”

            Nezumi laughed.

            “I’m serious!”

            “Yeah, yeah, that’s quite clear, professor.”

            The door opened abruptly, followed by Misaki’s voice. “Are you two decent?”

            “It’d hardly matter now, seeing as you’re already in here,” Nezumi told her. “And that couldn’t have been five minutes.”

            “Get off my stool,” Misaki said, coming beside Shion, who slipped quickly off her stool.

            “What are you doing to him?” Shion asked, glancing at Nezumi again.

            Nezumi looked in the mirror, saw the mess that was his face, wondered how on earth Shion had managed to say such ridiculous things like – _I’ve become selfish since I’ve met_ _you –_ when Nezumi’s face looked like an abstract painting by someone who was terrible at abstract paintings.

            “Blood coming out his eyes after they’ve been gouged. What did you guys talk about?”   

            “How talented you are with make-up,” Nezumi told her, and Misaki glared at him.

            “Fresh blood is darker than that,” Shion said, and Nezumi and Misaki both stared at him. Shion blinked back, his lips opening, then closing, then opening again. “I think,” he said weakly.

            Misaki turned Nezumi’s face to her again, stared intently at him. “He’s right,” she declared. “Dammit, I can’t believe this, it doesn’t look like blood at all!”

            “It’s worked fine the past few weeks,” Nezumi told her.

            “ _Fine?_ If someone told you your performance was _fine_ , would you be okay with that? No, you’d probably kick their teeth in!”

            “I doubt I’d do that. Are you saying you’re going to kick my teeth in because I said it was fine?” Nezumi asked mildly.

            “It looks like ketchup!” Misaki shouted, appearing horrified as she continued to stare at Nezumi’s face.

            “Um, I guess I should go. We’re okay, right?” Shion said.

            Nezumi took in Shion’s anxious look. “Of course, professor.”

            “Come to the bakery after your rehearsal? I have class, but I’ll be there after.”

            Nezumi shrugged. “I have an order anyway, some double tier anniversary cake I need to have iced by the end of the night for an early pick-up tomorrow.”

            Shion’s smile appeared as if it’d never been gone in the first place, goofy like it always was, ridiculous like it always was. “Okay. Good. I’ll see you later then.”

            Nezumi said nothing else. Watched until Shion left the room.

            “You’re in love with him.”

            Nezumi had forgotten Misaki was in the room. Her voice was hushed, and her eyes were wide.

            Nezumi observed her dramatic expression flatly. “You shouldn’t go pulling accusations like that out your ass, someone might take you seriously one day.”

            Misaki had her hands on her hips. “Yeah? You should take me seriously. I’ve watched you act for nearly eleven years. How many times have you played a character in love? And every time, we’d all sit back and believe it, the way you looked at whoever in the cast you were supposed to be falling for. Every play, there’d be new rumors about you, that you really were in love with a new cast member each time because it really looked like it.”

            “Just proves you’re a bunch of idiots,” Nezumi replied, settling back into his seat. “You going to fix the gouged eye look or what?”

            Misaki pointed at the door. “You fooled us every time, but never have I seen you look at anyone like you looked at that guy when he smiled at you. Your whole face softened. Even covered in this mess of make-up, you were smitten, and it wasn’t an act.”

            “You really do believe this crap you’re spouting, don’t you?” Nezumi asked. He could see it all over Misaki’s face. Amazement. Disbelief. As if it was impossible that Nezumi could fall in love. As if it couldn’t be real. As if to witness it was to see something incredible, unthinkable.

            Nezumi glanced at the mirror. Tried to ignore the make-up on his own face. Tried to see if he, too, looked amazed.

            He didn’t look amazed. He looked normal, tired if anything, and this was not much of a surprise.

            Nezumi had no reason to feel amazed. He’d gotten over amazement months ago, and his disbelief, and his denial. By now, all he felt was resigned, a tired acceptance of the feelings he had for his friend.

*


	7. Chapter 7

On seeing the words _Discreet Meat,_ Shion nearly choked on the bite of pancake he’d been planning to spit into a napkin.

            Nezumi lowered the newspaper from his face. “Stop being so loud.”

            Shion coughed the pancake bite into the napkin he was holding already, not bothering to hide it because he was choking, and that felt like a good enough excuse as any to spit human food out of his mouth with Nezumi looking at him.

            “I was choking,” he breathed.

            “Choke more quietly.”

            “Can I see that?” Shion asked, leaving his napkin beside his plate. He’d only managed to chew and spit half his pancake, and the other half was quickly soaking up syrup, making it even more disgusting. Shion had informed Nezumi he didn’t like syrup, but the man still poured an abundant amount on Shion’s pancakes, insisting Shion could use the extra calories.

            Nezumi had already replaced the newspaper in front of his face. It was the second week of April, Sunday morning, and they were in Safu’s kitchen. Shion had slept on her couch the night before, too lazy to return to his apartment after he and Safu had stayed up late talking. Shion had woken to Nezumi standing above him and thought maybe it was a dream, as Nezumi hadn’t even been at Safu’s apartment the night before.

            It hadn’t been a dream. Nezumi informed him he’d come to the Safu’s on the way to the bakery to collect her, as she’d promised to show him how to make soufflés. Somehow, plans of going to the bakery early had changed into Nezumi making pancakes and forcing them on Safu and Shion, who knew better than to argue. Shion had been lucky he hadn’t washed off his foundation the night before, or taken off his contacts. His eyes were dry, but Safu had spare contacts for him, and Shion had exchanged his old ones for the new in her bathroom while Nezumi made pancakes.

            Shion reached out when Nezumi didn’t reply, grabbed the newspaper from him.

            “What the – Excuse you,” Nezumi snapped.

            “I need to see this,” Shion said, hopping off Safu’s stool to get out of Nezumi’s reach. The headline on the page Nezumi had been reading was a continuation of the front page story, which Shion quickly flipped to.

            _“DISCREET MEAT” BLOOD BANK BUSTED, VAMPS IN CHARGE EXECUTED_

            Shion lost his breath. Tried to read the article so quickly he saw none of the individual characters, had to go back to the beginning, force himself to read more slowly.

            “Hey, you said you’d be ready to go when I got out of the shower.”

            Shion looked up from the article at Safu’s voice. He’d read it twice already. His hands were slick with sweat and he’d torn holes in the paper from holding it too tightly.

            “What’s going on?” Safu asked quickly.

            “He went crazy and stole the paper from me,” Nezumi complained.

            Shion looked at him numbly. He wasn’t sure he was breathing. Nezumi was eating the rest of Shion’s pancake.

            “Don’t yell at me. You steal my paper, I steal your pancakes,” Nezumi said, pointing his fork at Shion.  

            Safu had walked up to Shion, was reading the paper over Shion’s shoulder, then quickly grabbed it. “Did you read – ”

            “Yes,” Shion breathed.

            “All of it?”

            Shion knew what part of the article Safu was referring to. Discreet Meat had been clever, insisted on buyer anonymity and arranged blood supply drop-off points in public places like restaurants and gas stations. But that still left authorities who’d hacked into their files with addresses of restaurants and gas stations worldwide, where blood supplies had been dropped off.

            Discreet Meat had been supplying blood to twenty-three vamps in twelve countries – probably the majority of vamps that were still alive. The specific cities of each of their blood supply deliveries had been listed in the article.

            One was in Tokyo.

            “You worried there’s a vamp in Tokyo?” Nezumi asked, twirling his fork between his fingers lazily.

            Shion couldn’t speak.

            “This is good news,” Nezumi said, then ate another bite of pancake, and Shion realized for the first time how Nezumi was reacting.

            He was reacting normally. Months before, when Nezumi had watched a news story on two vamps being discovered in Greece, he had stiffened, gone quiet for the rest of the night. Now, there was proof of a vamp in Tokyo, and Nezumi appeared unfazed. Now, Nezumi was eating pancakes.

            “How is it good news?” Safu asked, after a minute of silence.

            Nezumi tilted his head as he looked at her. Licked his lips. Placed his fork carefully on his plate. “Always wanted to meet a vamp.”

            “You’ve already met vampires,” Safu said, sounding confused, and Nezumi’s small smile was bitter.

            “Of course, thank you for the reminder. Accurate as always, Safu.”

            “I’m sorry, I didn’t – ”

            Nezumi waved his hand. “Don’t apologize. You’re right, I’ve met hundreds of vamps. But I was a kid. Seven years old. Not old enough to do the meeting justice. Not old enough to do anything at all.”

            “What would you do?” Shion heard his voice without meaning to speak. It came out hoarse. He cleared his throat, tried again, louder now. “What would you do if you met one now?”

            Nezumi’s bitter smile grew. It was hardly a smile at all. There was a shine to Nezumi’s eyes, and for the first time, Shion did not see only beauty when he looked at his friend.

            He saw someone terrifying. Someone dangerous. Someone deadly.

            “I think about it every day. When I’m able to narrow down and choose the method of torture I’ll inflict, I’ll let you know. I’d offer to let you help, but I’m selfish. I want the pleasure all to myself. I think I deserve that, after the Great Slaughter and all,” Nezumi said. He spoke calmly, evenly, casually.

            There was still the taste of syrup in Shion’s mouth. Shion decided this was why he felt nauseous. This was why he felt sick, why his stomach turned, why his chest tightened, why his skin was hot, why he could barely breathe.

            There were still traces of syrup in his mouth, and this was why Shion wanted to run from Nezumi. To tell him the truth. To do neither, to break down, to fall on Safu’s kitchen floor, to cry. To argue with Nezumi. To apologize to Nezumi. To hit Nezumi.

            It was the syrup in his mouth, Shion convinced himself. This was why he felt himself unraveling. Why he couldn’t decide what to do. Why he could only stare, watch Nezumi’s bitter smile disappear, watch that deadly expression fade to softness, and then Nezumi was standing, and Shion took a step back from him, scared of him even though he had no reason to be.

            Nezumi had no idea that the syrup in Shion’s mouth was making Shion sick. Nezumi had no idea that anything human made Shion sick.

            Nezumi held out his hands, as if to show Shion he would do no harm to him – but what did Nezumi know? Nothing. The man knew nothing at all.

             “Hey, professor, maybe you should sit down. You look like you’re going to pass out.”

            Safu was by Shion’s side, then, her hand around his arm, guiding him back to the stool he’d vacated.

            He stared down at his plate, empty now but for remnants of syrup. He felt sick to look at it, certain he would throw up, but he couldn’t do that. He’d drunk a pint of blood from the stash Safu kept for him while Nezumi had made pancakes, when Nezumi had been humming in Safu’s kitchen, oblivious. If he threw up now, it’d be all blood coming out of him.

            Blood from Discreet Meat. Shion closed his eyes. His eyes burned. They were dry from having slept in his contacts. His eyes needed a break, but he almost always wore contacts now, was used to dry eyes that stayed dry even with eye drops. It was worth the risk. To keep Nezumi around, it was worth everything.

            “Shion. It won’t come for you. You wouldn’t be of interest to a vamp, you’re all skin and bone yourself, you think you’d be a lucrative kill?” Nezumi asked, speaking softly, and Shion flinched at the closeness of his voice, opened his eyes to see Nezumi leaning close to him.

            “Vamps don’t eat people, they drink blood,” he told Nezumi. His voice came out flat and hard.

            “Lucky you look anemic.”

            “You look anemic, and they still attacked the Gin Dynasty,” Shion snapped. He was angry. Let Nezumi think he was angry at vamps. Let Nezumi be so goddamn clueless, and Shion wanted to be amazed by this cluelessness, but he understood how such a smart man could be so stupid.

            Nezumi had lived through the Great Slaughter, so he thought he knew everything about vamps. He was so certain they were all the same – monstrous in their desperation for blood – that one could be inches from him, and all Nezumi would see was a human.

            Nezumi looked at Shion almost warily for a moment, but then his expression was soft again, and the man smiled lightly. “Don’t be so conceited, professor. Just because there’s a vamp in Tokyo doesn’t mean it’ll come after you. There’s a lot of people in this city, you know, you’ve got to stop thinking the world revolves around you.”

            Nezumi spoke jokingly, and Shion knew Nezumi was trying to make him feel better. Knew Nezumi was, in his own way, trying to comfort Shion, but this only made Shion angrier.

            He didn’t need to be comforted. He wasn’t scared of a vamp in Tokyo. He was the vamp in Tokyo, and he hated Nezumi, in that moment, for implying he was something to fear when Nezumi was the dangerous one – he’d said it himself, he’d admitted it himself, what he would do if he met a vamp.

            “Yeah? What about you?” Shion countered. “You’re self-centered, thinking you’ll meet the vamp and get to torture him. Or her. What, you’ve got some kind of vamp lure? Some kind of vamp trap?”

            “I don’t need a vamp trap. I know it’ll come for me.”

            “How can you know that?” Shion shouted, and if Nezumi was confused by his anger, he didn’t show it.

            Instead, he stayed calm. He regarded Shion, unfazed. “Vamps are drawn to me. Being the last survivor of the Gin Dynasty is a lure enough. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a vamp in Tokyo. Why do you think it’s here?”

            “What? To kill you?” Shion demanded, but his voice came out just a breath.

            _Vamps are drawn to me._

            The words stuck in Shion’s head, turned his stomach. Was that true? Shion couldn’t remember how it had happened. Seeing Nezumi in his lectures. Looking for Nezumi’s photograph in his roster. Noticing Nezumi every day. Speaking to Nezumi outside the lecture hall, seeing his silver eyes for the first time, feeling a pull towards Nezumi, not questioning it because it hadn’t felt like something to question.

            It had felt like a human want. To be drawn to Nezumi. Attracted to him. To desire Nezumi had only been human, Shion had been sure of it.

            He hadn’t considered for a second that it was a vamp instinct. His feelings for Nezumi – were they just vampire wants in the end?

            “Shion, listen to me. I lost everyone to vamps. I’m not going to let that happen again. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Nezumi said, leaning even closer, speaking even more softly, and Shion understood why.

            Shion understood that he must have looked devastated. Terrified. Uncertain and confused and horrified. He couldn’t hide what he felt, trying to remember why he’d been attracted to Nezumi in the first place.

            Had it been the pale skin? The light green veins he could see underneath it? Had it just been that all along?

            “Shion – ”

            “I feel sick,” Shion announced. He said it for Safu, so she could get Nezumi out. He felt the blood in his throat, rising. He couldn’t swallow it back. He couldn’t stop it. “I need space, please, I just want to be alone.” 

            “Come on, you heard him,” Safu said, her voice hard, inviting no argument.

            “But – ”

            “Nezumi, he can’t breathe, and you’re crowding him. Just give him some space, will you?” Safu said roughly.

            “Did you know he was this scared of vamps?” Nezumi asked, and his voice was quieter, from farther away, and then, more sharply – “Quit pulling me so hard, you’ve got a death grip, dammit woman.”

            Shion heard Safu’s front door open next, and then he couldn’t keep his mouth closed any longer. It was filled with blood, and he lurched over, avoiding the counter and the plate with remnants of syrup and aiming for Safu’s floor.

            Blood splattered on the tile. Shion kept vomiting. He blamed it on the taste of syrup, still lingering in his mouth, and tried to think of nothing else.

*

Shion started getting skinny again.

            He was always too skinny, but Nezumi had watched him go from healthy to sickly before, back when Nezumi had merely been pretending to be a student in Shion’s lectures. Then, he hadn’t been watching at a close range.

            Now, Nezumi was very close. It was the end of May, six weeks after the article busting that online blood bank had revealed a vamp in Tokyo, and Shion was wearing his layered sweaters despite the fact that summer had arrived in full.

            Nezumi had slept with Shunsuke the night before. He’d gotten to the bakery later than usual on Saturday morning, but Shion wasn’t even there when he’d walked into the kitchen.

            Nezumi waited until he’d tied up his hair, washed his hands, pulled on an apron, and started pitting cherries before glancing at Safu, who was taking inventory of Karan’s supplies so she could make a trip to the store.

            “Where’s Shion?”

            “I don’t know. I don’t have a tracker on him. Probably at home.”   

            “He’s always here Saturday mornings.”

            “Not always,” Safu replied, writing something on her Post-It.         

            “Safu.”

            “Hmm? Do we need sugar, how much is left in that bag beside you?”

            “Safu, forget the sugar. Look at me.”

            Safu glanced up from her Post-It, looking startled. “What is it?”

            Nezumi pushed the bowl of cherries away from him. Turned to face Safu fully, needing to watch her expression closely. “I need to know what’s wrong with him.”

            “Shion? He’s probably just sleeping in for once, it’s not a crime, you certainly do it enough – ”

            “He’s getting sick again. I know you know. I let him keep his secrets, but now – ”

            “Now what? Nothing’s changed from before. If he doesn’t want you to know, he doesn’t want you to know, and it’s not up to me to tell you anything,” Safu said, her expression hardening.

            “He was better for a while,” Nezumi insisted. “Is it because he’s scared of the vamp in Tokyo? Because – ”

            “It’s a seasonal thing,” Safu interrupted, gesturing vaguely, and Nezumi narrowed his eyes.

            “That’s bullshit. Don’t fucking lie to me, Safu. He lost it when that article about the vamp came out.”

            “Don’t you get angry with me. It has nothing to do with the vamp, he was just shocked, or felt sick from all of that syrup you put on his pancakes that morning – you know he doesn’t like sweets. That’s all it was. And anyway, it’s none of your business.”

            “Of course it is.”

            “Why? You’re not his boyfriend,” Safu snapped, and Nezumi leaned back, clenched his jaw, then made himself relax.

            “I am fully aware of that. I need to be the guy’s boyfriend to give a damn?”

            Safu sighed, the anger leaving her face. “Nezumi. Give it a rest. He’ll tell you when he wants to.”

            “And in the meantime, I should just let him deteriorate before my eyes.”

            “He’s not deteriorating, it’s nothing so dramatic. I know what’s going on with him, and I promise you, I care about him just as much as you do. More, I should say, seeing as I’ve known him all twenty-seven years of his life, and you haven’t known him even a full year yet. When I’m worried, then you can be worried, I’ll even let you know. Right now, we’re not at that point.”

            Nezumi crossed his arms. “How long until we get to that point?”

            “I’m planning on never getting to that point,” Safu replied easily.

            Nezumi examined her, even as she turned back to her Post-It, reaching over Nezumi to grab the bag of sugar, peek inside of it. She didn’t look worried, and Nezumi wanted to feel reassured by this, but he didn’t.

            “Does Karan know?”

            “Of course,” Safu said, rolling the top of the sugar bag closed again.

            “And she’s not worried?”

            Safu smiled, suddenly, looked at Nezumi again. “Oh, Nezumi. You’re just not used to it.”

            “Not used to what?” Nezumi demanded. There was something patronizing in Safu’s tone, and Nezumi felt his jaw tighten at the amused look she gave him.

            “Worrying about Shion. Karan and I have been doing it for longer than I can remember. We’re better at it, trust me, leave us to it and don’t you worry about anything.”

            Nezumi unclenched his jaw. “You just said you weren’t worried.”

            “Right now, I’m not. Not enough for it to mean anything bad is going to happen. Listen, Nezumi, Shion has enough people worrying about him. He doesn’t want you to worry too. So don’t. Let him have someone who acts like everything is fine. I’ve seen your acting, you’re good at it, I’m sure you can pull this off.”

            “If you need me to act, that means everything isn’t fine.”

            “Everything is fine enough, Nezumi,” Safu said, and this time, her voice was hard. She turned around, opened a cupboard, and Nezumi knew without needing to try that any further conversation with her on the subject wasn’t going to happen. As stubborn as Shion was, Safu was even more so.

            Nezumi frowned at her back. Checked the time on the microwave. It was noon, and Shion wasn’t here yet.

            Nezumi looked to the door anyway, as if Shion might appear at that moment, smiling one of those ridiculous smiles of his so that Nezumi might be tricked, just for a moment, into believing that there was nothing wrong with him.

*

Shion had not been conserving his pints of blood. He’d made an order of thirty pints through Discreet Meat a week before they’d been discovered, and two days after they’d been discovered had been the day of Shion’s blood supply delivery.

            Obviously, Shion had not gone to the gas station to pick up the blood. Instead, Shion had watched on the news footage of police going to the gas station, ambushing the place, hoping to find some stupid vamp who hadn’t already heard that Discreet Meat and all of their shipping addresses and delivery dates had been discovered.

            Shion wouldn’t be surprised if that was another vamp stereotype. Vamps couldn’t read newspapers. Vamps never watched the news. Vamps were clueless and primitive, did not care about what was going on in the world, only cared about blood.

            Six weeks had passed since Discreet Meat had been discovered and Shion’s thirty-pint blood supply order had been picked up by authorities. Shion and his mother and Safu had been looking for a different blood bank, but every online bank had been shut down, probably out of fear now that Discreet Meat had been caught. Even the oldest vamp banks had gone under the radar – Shion couldn’t even reach the contact he’d had at the donation-based vamp bank from which he’d been getting blood before he’d switched to Discreet Meat.

            Shion had four pints of blood left when Discreet Meat went down, and he’d been rationing it during the previous six weeks with difficulty. He’d gotten used to a diet of a daily pint of blood. Starvation had been easier when his body had been used to it, but Shion was out of practice. He let himself have a little less than fifty milliliters a day, hardly three swallows. Each pint lasted about ten days at this rate, and Shion knew he used to stretch pints to a month, but he couldn’t manage that anymore.

            Shion stared at the last forty-five milliliters he had left. He picked up the beaker, put it to his face, inhaled deeply, thinking maybe he’d just smell it, maybe that would be enough, he would save the blood for the next day.

            Shion didn’t wait. He drank it down, and then it was gone, and Shion felt hungrier than he had on waking. He’d already put in his contacts and applied foundation and dressed, but after Shion brushed his teeth to rid them of any trace of blood, he returned to bed. It was Saturday and he always helped his mother open the bakery Saturday mornings, but Shion was too exhausted to make the short walk to the bakery. He didn’t want his mother to see him like this, or Safu, or Nezumi, whom Shion knew was likely there as well.

            Shion had been in bed for only five minutes, already drifting to sleep, when there was a series of knocks on his door. Shion sat up abruptly, certain for a moment that it was the Tokyo authorities, or a Vamp Hunter, that he’d been found.

            “Professor! Open up already, don’t you know it’s rude to make visitors wait outside your door?”

            Shion’s relief had him dizzy, but then he realized it wasn’t the relief. It was his hunger that blacked out his vision for a few seconds after he stood up from his bed. He took deep breaths, then stopped at the bathroom to make sure his white roots weren’t showing, his contacts were in, and his foundation was fine.

            When he opened the door, Nezumi immediately pushed his way in.

            “Nezumi, now’s not a good time,” Shion managed, still at the doorway, though Nezumi had already walked all the way into Shion’s small apartment.

            Nezumi sat on the edge of Shion’s bed. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”

            “Nothing’s going on,” Shion said, giving a weak look at the open doorway before closing the door, turning to face Nezumi.

            He wanted to lean on the closed door, but he worried Nezumi would notice that he couldn’t stand easily on his own.

            “How has denial worked for you in the past?” Nezumi asked, standing up from the bed, walking to Shion, who stepped back, the door behind him, but Shion no longer wanted its support.

            He wanted it to be open, so he could leave out of it. He wanted to get away from Nezumi and his worry and his examination.

            Any part of Shion that had considered confessing to Nezumi the truth had been erased after the newspaper article. Shion could never tell him. He knew that now. He could never let Nezumi find out.

            Nezumi stepped closer as Shion stepped back, and then Shion was trapped, and Nezumi lifted his arm, pressed his hand flat against the door so Shion was caged in on one side.

            “Nezumi – ”

            “Just tell me.”

            Shion closed his eyes. He had to make something up. He’d lied his whole life, but Nezumi made it difficult to even think.

            When he opened his eyes, he could see the green veins underneath the thin skin of Nezumi’s neck. He looked up from Nezumi’s neck, then back again, quickly, remembering.

            The hickey. Nezumi hadn’t had one since the first that Safu had pointed out in Karan’s kitchen two months before, but Shion knew Nezumi was sleeping with other men. He could smell it on the man, the scent of another human that Nezumi hadn’t been able to wash out in the shower. It was usually – but not always – the same human, though of course, Nezumi didn’t say anything. It was someone who smelled like rain, which combined with Nezumi’s earthy scent.

            Now, Nezumi smelled of the earth after a storm. Shion looked up, met Nezumi’s eyes, saw the concentration there, wondered if at the very least, he could distract the man from his focus. At the very least, he could give Nezumi something else to concentrate on.

            “I’m sorry,” Shion finally said.

            “Don’t even try that, Shion, I’m seriously getting sick of your – ”

            “I told you I made up my mind. I told you it wouldn’t change.”

            Nezumi’s hard gaze faltered. He blinked at Shion. “What are you talking about?” he asked, after a moment.

            Shion looked at Nezumi’s lips. He still thought about kissing the man. He thought about it all the time. For as much as Shion was trying to distract Nezumi, even more than that, he just wanted to kiss him.

            “I don’t want to be friends.” Shion couldn’t give Nezumi the truth, but this was a truth as well. A smaller truth, but it didn’t feel small. It didn’t feel any less important than the fact that he was a vamp.

            Nezumi dropped his hand from the door. Stepped back from Shion. “Are you trying to piss me off?” he finally asked, his voice light.

            Shion shook his head. Swallowed. “I thought I could get over you. I thought it was just a crush. I didn’t realize – I didn’t know how much I – ”

            Nezumi held up a hand. “I’m going to stop you there.”

            “Nezumi – ”

            “I’ll give you some advice, professor. You’re better off shutting up, and I’ll even let you pretend you never opened your mouth in the first place. Kind of me, don’t you think?” Nezumi asked, and there was a warning in his gaze, but Shion ignored it.

            Ignored everything that told him to stop. Stepped forward, and again. Tilted his head up. Felt Nezumi’s hand on his chest, restraining him from getting closer, but not pushing him away.

            “I’ve moved on, Shion,” Nezumi said evenly.

            “I don’t believe you,” Shion said back, but really, he had no idea, maybe Nezumi loved this man who smelled of rain.

            Shion was certain his heart stopped at the thought. Maybe Nezumi felt the halt of Shion’s heartbeat with his hand on Shion’s chest. Maybe that was why Nezumi dropped his hand. Maybe that was why Nezumi’s gaze turned from flat to wary. Maybe that was why Nezumi said right back, his voice quiet now –

            “I don’t believe you either.”

            Shion didn’t bother to reply. Without Nezumi’s hand in the way, he was free to lean forward again, and he didn’t hesitate.

            He kissed Nezumi, and it took only a second before Nezumi was kissing him back.

            Nezumi tasted of cherries, and normally the taste of human food would have made Shion gag, but all he felt now was nostalgia.

            _Cherry pie was my favorite._

            The memory swooped through him, unbidden, but Shion didn’t have time to dwell on it, and soon it had dissipated again as Shion found himself with his back against the closed front door once more.

            Nezumi kissed him hard. Harder than he had before, once in Karan’s kitchen, once in Shion’s campus office. But just as Shion had the thought, Nezumi was kissing him softly, too softly, Shion nearly slid down the door, his legs turned weak so that they could hardly hold his weight up.

            Shion pushed his fingers into Nezumi’s hair. It was down, around his shoulders, against his neck. It was thick but soft. Shion pulled it, felt Nezumi gasp against his lips.

            “Careful, professor,” Nezumi whispered, but Shion didn’t want to be careful. He was so tired of being careful. It was the end of May. In just over three months, Shion would turn twenty-eight. Didn’t that mean he’d been careful for long enough?

            “The bed,” Shion whispered back, and Nezumi stopped kissing him, leaned away from him, raised an eyebrow.

            Nezumi said nothing, but he looked doubtful, like Shion could change his mind at any minute, and Shion knew that was a fair reaction.

            He didn’t care. He grabbed Nezumi’s hand. Pulled the man, and Shion was strong, could crush all of Nezumi’s bones if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He just wanted to pull Nezumi to his bed, so he did that, and Nezumi didn’t make it difficult.

            Shion sat on the mattress. Scooched back. In front of the bed, Nezumi shed his shirt. Shion knew he had to do the same. He’d applied foundation to his entire scar, as he always did, even though no one ever saw him naked. Even so, he took precautions, and ever since meeting Nezumi, he took more precautions. He was not foolish. He did not take risks, but everything about Nezumi was a risk, and if Shion was going to starve until he was too weak to do anything, he was going to have sex with Nezumi first.

            He took off his own shirt. Looked down at himself, just in case a bit of his scar showed, but nothing did, and Nezumi wasn’t even looking at him.

            The man was already peeling off his jeans and boxers at the same time, stooping down, having to kick off his boots with his jeans and boxers around his ankles before he could get them off fully.

            He stood up again. Shion was still holding his shirt in his lap, curled his fingers in the fabric, uncertain suddenly, with Nezumi utterly naked in front of his bed.

            Nezumi got on the bed on his knees. Shion slid back away from him. “Um…”

            “Something wrong, professor?” Nezumi asked. He tucked his hair behind his ears. He didn’t look hesitant at all anymore. He had experience. This was obvious. Shion didn’t even own a condom, and the thought occurred to him in a flash of heat.

            “The thing is…” Shion gestured vaguely, and Nezumi tilted his head. He was completely naked but for his socks, and Shion had no idea what to do with this fact.

            Nezumi looked at Shion for another moment. His eyes fell from Shion’s face now to Shion’s chest, then lower, his ribs, his stomach.

            Shion looked down at himself. Saw what he examined every morning as he applied _Warm Silk_ – ribs jutting out unnaturally. His stomach sunken in. Bones wrapped in skin and hardly anything else.

            Shion wrapped his arms around himself, a pathetic attempt to cover his body, but Nezumi had crawled forward, grabbed Shion’s wrists, moved Shion’s arms with alarming urgency.

            “Nezumi, I – ”

            “Fuck, Shion,” Nezumi breathed. He dropped Shion’s wrists. “Fuck.”

            “It’s not – I’m fine – It looks worse than – ”

            Nezumi was shaking his head. Moving back, but Shion was faster, reached out, caught Nezumi’s arm, didn’t let go.

            “Wait. Wait, Nezumi, I know. I know. You’re right, you’ve been right. There’s something wrong with me. Please don’t leave. Even if you’re disgusted with how I look, I just need you to – ”

            Nezumi’s arm jerked in Shion’s grasp, but Shion was stronger. Shion was stronger than Nezumi could imagine.

            “Disgusted? Shit, Shion, I don’t give a damn what you look like! You’re starving yourself – ”

            “I’m sick!” Shion shouted, and Nezumi stopped trying to pull his arm free. “I’m sick, and it’s not contagious, and it’s not an STD, and it’s not an eating disorder, and I can’t tell you what it is. I’m sick, and I’m scared I’m going to die soon, and I just want to have sex with you, so can you just – if you want to, I don’t want to pressure you, that’s not why – but if you still want to, then can we, can we just do that?”

            Nezumi’s eyes were wide. Shion let go of his arm. Took a breath. He hadn’t realized he was scared he was going to die until that moment, but now that he’d said it out loud, he felt it all over – his own fear.

            He didn’t know when he’d get his next supply of blood. Safu had told him the night before that both she and Shion’s mother had been drawing their own blood even while Shion had a steady supply from Discreet Meat, that they’d been keeping it for an emergency, that they had multiple pints saved up. Shion had wanted to yell at her. He’d been so angry he could barely stand it, but more than angry, he’d been horrified at what his friend and his mother had been doing to themselves without his knowledge.

            Shion couldn’t keep letting the people he loved draw their blood. He’d starve until he could find another supplier, he’d decided that the night before on seeing the saved up pints of blood in her apartment. He wouldn’t ever drink another drop of Safu’s blood or his mother’s blood. He wouldn’t let them make sacrifices for him again.

            But what had happened to Discreet Meat seemed to have terrified every blood supplier. Shion understood this. The two American vamps who’d run Discreet Meat had been killed without trial. Shion didn’t think any vamp banks or online blood banks would be popping up again soon.

            It was another vamp stereotype that vamps could only be killed with a stake through the heart. Vamps could die any way that humans could – even old age. But Shion doubted any vamp since the Great Slaughter had been allowed to die of old age.

            “Please don’t look at me like that. I didn’t want to tell you,” Shion said, his voice small even in his own ears. “I might not die, maybe that was getting ahead of myself, but it’s a possibility, and I think I have to acknowledge it now. You wanted me to be honest, and that’s as honest as I can be.”

            “What’s wrong with you?” Nezumi asked quickly.

            Shion shook his head. “I can’t tell you. Please stop asking me.”

            “So that’s it? You’ve given up? Resigned yourself to death already?”

            “You don’t understand, Nezumi.”

            “Then tell me!” Nezumi shouted. His eyes were still wide. As angry as his voice was, he looked only scared.

            Shion let his knees drop from his chest. Watched Nezumi’s gaze trace his torso again, quick sweeps, the crease between his eyes deepening.

            “I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you that I like you a lot, and I want to be with you, not just as friends. I want a relationship with you, for as long as I can have it. If that’s still what you want, then – ”

            “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Nezumi’s voice was incredulous, and then he was getting off the bed. When he turned, Shion could see a glimpse of color over the pale of his bare back, but Nezumi pulled his t-shirt on too quickly for Shion to really make out whatever it was. It had been dark red. Maybe a scar of some sort. A burn, Shion thought, but he pushed down the idea the moment it came to him.

            “Nezumi, wait – ”

            Nezumi glared at him as he yanked on his boxers and jeans. “You tell me you’re going to die, then follow it with a stupid little confession? I’m not going to be your boyfriend till you decide to kick the bucket, what kind of nonsense – ”

            “I’m not deciding anything. This isn’t my decision.”

            “For as stubborn as you are, I really must say, the fact that you’ve just accepted your death – ”

            Shion scrambled off the bed to intercept Nezumi, who’d walked to the door holding his boots, not bothering to put them on. Shion made it to the door first. Slammed himself in front of it.

            “Move – ”

            “I haven’t accepted my death. I’m terrified of it. I don’t want to die. I want to live, and that’s why I kissed you, and that’s why I’m telling you how I feel about you, and that’s why I’m asking you if you still feel like you did months ago when you asked me to change my mind. I’ve changed it. I don’t care how ridiculous you think I am. If you like me, you should tell me.”

            “You really think I could like a guy like you? You’re a complete idiot, talking about death like you’ve got no choice in the matter – ”

            “I don’t – ”

            “You do!” Nezumi yelled. He had dropped his boots and pointed a finger at Shion. “I’ve seen more people than you can fathom in that ridiculous brain of yours who weren’t given a choice to live or die. You’re not one of them.”

            Nezumi’s anger was so vivid on the man’s features that Shion felt his heart racing, but he didn’t break Nezumi’s gaze. “I need you to listen to me. You think I chose to go through this? You think I chose to lose more body mass than I can afford? You think any of this is a choice? Why wouldn’t I want to live? Why wouldn’t I fight if I had the chance? Why would I give up?”

            Nezumi stepped back from him. He shoved his bangs off his face roughly. “How should I know what goes on in your head?”

            “I’ll tell you then. I want to live. And since I met you, that want has only been stronger, more desperate. I like you so much, Nezumi, it worried me at first, but I’m used to it now. If anything, I want to live just to be around you longer. I wasn’t unhappy before you, but now, now dying is so much more terrifying because I haven’t even known you a year. I’ve only kissed you three times. There’s so many things we haven’t done. I don’t know if I’m going to die, I don’t. But I know I’m going to get sicker. And I know that whatever risk it is to have a relationship with you is worth it now. This is a lot of pressure on you, I get that. I know you hate secrets, you hate not knowing what’s going on with me. But I can’t tell you. I’ll give you any other truth but that.”

            Shion caught his breath after he finished speaking, waited for Nezumi’s reply. He waited for Nezumi to make fun of him, to laugh, to scoff, to narrow his eyes and call Shion ridiculous, dramatic, full of shit.

            Nezumi didn’t do any of that. He watched Shion in his careful way, and when he spoke, his tone wasn’t sarcastic or skeptical. It was even, unreadable. “Why would I want to care any more about you if you’re just going to die? Haven’t I known enough people who’ve died?”

            Shion had no reply to this. He hadn’t thought about it this way, what Nezumi might lose. He felt himself deflate, felt himself sag back against the front door. “I guess you have,” he said quietly.

            Nezumi looked down at Shion again. Shion wished he had his shirt on. “Are you lying to me?” he asked, after half a minute of looking at Shion.

            “No, I’m not lying, Nezumi.”

            “You really think you’re going to die.”

            “I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t been healthy in a long time, but it’s gotten worse recently.”

            “Why did it get worse?”

            Shion shook his head. “You can’t ask me that.”

            “What can I ask you?”

            “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

            Nezumi stared up at the ceiling. Shion could see the clench of his jaw. “I’m just supposed to believe all this shit.”

            “I don’t have any reason to lie to you.”

            “You lie all the goddamn time,” Nezumi snapped.

            “I don’t want to anymore. I lie to everyone all the time, and I’m so tired of it.”

            Nezumi exhaled hard. “What am I supposed to do with that, Shion? What do you want me to do?”

             “I want you to kiss me, if you still want that too.”

            Nezumi didn’t kiss him. His expression didn’t change. “You said just now that it’d be a risk to have a relationship with me, that now it’s worth the risk. And months ago, you came into my dressing room at the theater after you lost your shit about that hickey I had, remember?”

           Shion nodded. He remembered every conversation he’d had with Nezumi. Every second of him.

           “You told me you wanted a physical relationship, but that you couldn’t because I’d find out your secret, and I’d hate you. That’s the risk you’re talking about now, right? That I’ll find out whatever the hell is going on with you.”

            Shion wondered why Nezumi put up with him. How he hadn’t had enough, after all the times Shion had turned him away. “Yes. That’s the risk. That’s why I said no to a relationship, that’s why I said we should just be friends. I didn’t want you to find out.”

            “Because if we had a physical relationship, I’d see you like this,” Nezumi said, looking down at Shion’s bare torso again, and Shion looked down at himself again, his bones against his skin. That wasn’t his secret. Starving wasn’t a secret. Eating was the secret. His scar was the secret, and his eyes, and his hair, and the poison in his veins that had replaced the blood when he’d been bitten. But Shion couldn’t say any of that.

            Shion curled his fingers into his palms. “I knew you’d be upset. I knew you’d demand to know what was wrong with me.”

            “You said I’d hate you.”        

            Shion said nothing.

            “You think I’d hate you for dying?” Nezumi asked.

            “Don’t you?” Shion asked back, even though dying was not what he knew Nezumi would hate him for. He was certain Nezumi would argue, but instead, the man seemed to think about it.

            “Yeah,” Nezumi finally said. “Yeah, I do. I’ve seen enough people die, I don’t need one more, Shion, I really don’t.”

            Shion’s heart surely stopped. His throat felt tight. “I know that,” he managed. “I’m sorry, Nezumi.”

            “You were right. You were right to put distance between us. If you thought you were going to die, why did you even let us be friends? You should have just told me to fuck off right from the bat.”

            Shion clenched his jaw so he couldn’t say anything. His eyes burned.

            “But you didn’t. You asked me to be your friend. You asshole,” Nezumi hissed. “Didn’t you know I’d already lost everyone? Why would you add yourself to the list? Did you not think about how selfish you were being?”

            Shion was so relieved for the door behind his back, keeping him from crumpling to the floor at Nezumi’s feet. He wanted to speak, to defend himself, but he couldn’t. Nezumi was right. He was selfish.

            “And now it’s too late,” Nezumi said, and there was nothing in his expression but anger.              

           “Too late?” Shion whispered.

            Nezumi lifted his hand to Shion’s face. Shion thought the man might hit him, but instead, Nezumi touched him gently, the tips of his fingers trailing over Shion’s lips.

            “You should have told me from the beginning not to feel anything for you,” Nezumi said quietly. “You should have told me you were going to be like everyone else.”

            Shion didn’t have to ask. Everyone else had died. Everyone else had been taken from Nezumi. Everyone else had left him alone.

            “I know,” Shion breathed, his lips moving beneath Nezumi’s light touch.

            Nezumi leaned forward. His fingers dropped down to Shion’s skin, and then Nezumi was tilting up Shion’s chin. “You’re right. I hate you,” he told Shion, when his lips were not an inch from Shion’s own.

            Shion closed his eyes. Felt Nezumi’s words land on his lips in a hot breath.

            “I never thought I could hate a human the way I hate you.”

            Shion didn’t tell Nezumi he wasn’t human. He couldn’t if he’d wanted to, as Nezumi kissed him, just for a second, hardly that.

            When he stopped, he leaned back only an inch or so, watched Shion closely.

            “It’d be so easy, if that was it. If I could just hate you, and feel nothing else. Make it easy on me, Shion. Tell me something so I just hate you, and everything else goes away.”

            Shion had to repeat the words in his head twice, to make sure he’d heard correctly. His thoughts felt fuzzy as it was from the brief kiss, so brief he wasn’t even sure it’d happened. “Everything else? What else do you feel?”

             “Don’t you know, professor? Don’t you know everything?” Nezumi asked lightly. He wasn’t angry anymore. He looked, if anything, resigned. Tired.

            “No, I don’t know. Tell me.”

            Nezumi gave a worn smile. Shion had never seen the man look so beautiful. “I can’t tell you. It’s my secret. If you get one, I get one too.”

            Shion looked back and forth between the soft silver of Nezumi’s eyes. Nezumi would never guess Shion’s secret because the man thought he knew what vamps looked like, thought he knew what vamps acted like, thought Shion couldn’t possibly be one because he didn’t look or act at all like the vamps Nezumi had encountered in his life.

            But Shion thought he could guess Nezumi’s secret much more easily. Shion had caught himself in the mirror, applying foundation to his scar every morning, thinking about Nezumi and seeing the way his own expression changed. Seeing the way his own eyes softened, just like Nezumi’s did now.

            _Do you love me?_ Shion thought, but he didn’t ask.

            _I love you too, you know,_ he could have said, but he didn’t do that either.

            Instead, he kissed Nezumi again. It felt safer than admitting secrets, and Nezumi must have agreed, as he kissed Shion back.

*


	8. Chapter 8

It was Nezumi, now, who needed to take things slow.

            He wanted to take things slow not out of any sense of hesitance or uncertainty, but to give Shion time. Time to heal, the way he’d healed before. The way the professor had come to lecture that one day back in November, full of energy as if he hadn’t been deteriorating for weeks beforehand.

            “It doesn’t work like that,” Shion said, pulling Nezumi back towards him by the hem of Nezumi’s shirt, but Nezumi pushed Shion away again.

            It was Sunday, the day after Shion’s dying confession. Nezumi didn’t find it hard to believe Shion. He looked like he was dying. But he’d gotten better before. Nezumi remembered – it was possible, he knew this.

            “Stop pushing me away, are you just trying to get back at me for when I made us just be friends?” Shion asked, frustrated, letting go of Nezumi’s t-shirt and getting off the bed.

            Previous to Shion’s departure from the bed, he and Nezumi had been sitting on the edge of it and making out in Shion’s old room above the bakery. They were supposed to be cleaning out the bakery, which was closed for the night, but when Nezumi had taken off his apron and left the kitchen to get the broom, Shion had accosted him in the hallway, dragged him up the stairs to his old bedroom.

            “Fortunately, I’m not as petty as you are. If you think I’m just going to let you die and make out with me to distract yourself from the fact that you’re letting yourself die, you’re stupider than you look.”      

            “We can do more than make out,” Shion said, returning to the bed – his brief tantrum apparently over – smiling now, straddling Nezumi, who considered pushing the guy off his lap.

            Instead, Nezumi let his hands fall over Shion’s waist. Held the man securely where he was. Even sitting fully on his lap, Shion’s weight could be no more than that of a bag or two of flour. Beneath Shion’s sweaters – because of course he wore two sweaters despite it being the tail-end of May – Nezumi could still feel the bones of the man’s hips.

            He lifted Shion’s sweaters. Looked at the way Shion’s pelvic bone pushed against his skin until Shion was tugging his sweaters back down to cover himself.

            “It looks worse than it is,” Shion said quietly.

            “I’m going to need you to stop saying that. You got better before. Not completely, but you weren’t skeletal for a while. Were you on some kind of medication? Why don’t you go back on it?”

            Shion frowned. “Has it occurred to you that it hurts my feelings when you say I look skeletal.”

            “Has it occurred to you that it hurts a lot more than your feelings when you don’t give a shit about your health?”

            “I do give a shit!” Shion huffed, sliding off Nezumi’s legs, and Nezumi hardly felt as if any weight had been lifted from him. “I’m not going to spend every second of the day talking about this with you. You know nothing about what’s going on with me, but I do, I’ve lived with it nearly all my life, and I’m going to take care of it. So quit worrying.”

            “If I looked like that, you’d be fine with it?” Nezumi countered.

            Shion sighed. Sat back on the bed beside Nezumi, and Nezumi suspected it had more to do with the fact that the man looked too exhausted to keep standing than anything. “I’d be upset too, Nezumi. I understand that. But I’d trust you to know what was best for yourself.”

            “That’s why you’re an idiot and I’m not. Clearly, you don’t know what’s best for yourself.”

            “How can you blame me for being sick? I didn’t do this to myself. It happened to me. I was three years old, there was nothing I could do!” Shion shouted, and he looked exhausted for the effort.

            Nezumi scrutinized him. Watched the man fall back on the bed, lie on his back with his legs hooked over the edge, his face to the ceiling.

            Nezumi looked at him for a moment before lying beside him. He turned his cheek so he could watch Shion’s profile. “You’ve been sick with whatever this is since you were three?”

            Shion had closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he said softly.

            “You survived since then. Why is it different now?”

            “Sometimes things change.”

            “So things can change again. And you can get better again.”

            Shion opened his eyes. Tilted his head so he faced Nezumi. “Maybe.”

            Nezumi was trying to figure out a way to get Shion to tell him whatever secret illness he had, but then Shion was speaking again.

            “Hey, can I ask you something?”

            “Never thought you’d ask permission to be nosy.”

            Shion chewed on his lip. “We’re more than friends now, right?”

            “Figured as much, since you keep trying to get in my pants now, which is certainly a new development,” Nezumi replied slowly, trying to read Shion’s expression.

            “I just mean… You’re okay not being with anyone else. Because I don’t want you to be with anyone else. Maybe you’ve never done an exclusive relationship before, maybe that’s not something you’re interested in, but I don’t think I could bear if you – ”

            “I really don’t give a shit about fucking other people, professor. It was a way to pass the time when I had nothing better to do. Stop looking so nervous.” Nezumi noted that Shion’s nervous expression didn’t change despite his words. He tried not to roll his eyes and added, “I just did it before to make you jealous, anyway.”

            At this, as he’d predicted, Shion’s nervousness disappeared, giving way to skepticism. “You wanted to make me jealous?”

            “Worked, didn’t it? Look who was begging me to hop in bed yesterday. Let’s see, it’s almost the beginning of June, so it only took, what, half a year after you made a friendship vow to get you to break it?”

            Shion smiled, as Nezumi knew he would. It was a tired version of his usual smile, but Nezumi would take it. “Six months is a long time to wait for someone. You must have been pining.”

            “Being so self-centered is an ugly trait,” Nezumi replied. He pushed himself up from the bed with his elbows, glanced down at Shion. “We should get back downstairs and clean the kitchen.”

            Shion wrapped his hand around Nezumi’s wrist. His fingers were freezing. “Let’s stay here a little longer.”

            Nezumi would have argued, but Shion looked too tired to move, so he lay back down. Shion’s cold fingers trickled down Nezumi’s wrist, and Nezumi felt as Shion weaved his fingers through his own.

            Nezumi let Shion hold his hand. He would wait for Shion to fall asleep – knowing it wouldn’t take long, the man’s eyes were already closed again – and then he would go downstairs on his own, clean the bakery himself.

            He would let Shion rest awhile and hope, in his rest, that Shion might recover a little from whatever was killing him.

*

In preparation for sex, Shion dyed his pubic hair the same color he dyed his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes.

            He experimented with more foundations. He needed a new one anyway – _Warm Silk_ no longer matched his skin tone. He’d gotten paler after not eating, and he couldn’t risk being even half a shade off if Nezumi was going to be inspecting his body. This was an opportunity to try new foundation brands, and he enlisted Safu’s help to both find a shade and test its resilience. 

            They were doing the latter on a Friday, almost a full week after he’d started his relationship – beyond friendship – with Nezumi. They hadn’t yet had sex, which was frustrating, but also a relief. Shion needed to make sure his foundation would hold up.

            Safu pushed her fingers against Shion’s cheek. “Well, it didn’t rub right off,” she said, looking at her fingertips, while Shion looked in the mirror. His scar was still covered.

            “This is the best brand we’ve tried yet,” Shion said, checking the label of the tube. The shade was called _Ghost Kiss._

            “Just because it’s touch proof doesn’t mean its sweat proof.”

            “I’m not going to be sweating, I haven’t got the body warmth capacity to sweat,” Shion reminded.

            “Nezumi might sweat.”

            “It’s waterproof.”

            “He’ll be rubbing up against you, touching you, kissing you. Let’s be candid, Shion, the man will be fucking you, and that’s a little bit different than me touching your cheek with my fingers.”

            Shion glanced at Safu quickly before turning back to the mirror. “He looks at me like I’m dying, and if he ever lets us have sex, he’ll probably touch me the same way. Like I’ll break, like I’m fragile. I think this should hold up,” Shion said, rubbing at his cheek with his own fingers. “You’re the one who said it’s worth the risk, remember?”

            “I was being stupid, I was caught up in your happiness!” Safu said, throwing up her hands. “That was before I knew Nezumi was picking out a torture plan for when he meets a vamp.”

            Shion hesitated. “Maybe it’ll be different now. If he found out I was – ”

            “Shion, you can’t take the chance. We know how he feels about vamps, it’s no longer an option to tell him.”

            Shion didn’t argue. Safu was right.

            They cleaned his bathroom from the mess they’d made trying out different foundations, and by then, Shion was exhausted, ready to sleep even though it wasn’t yet seven at night, and he had a stack of final papers that he had to grade by the end of the week so that final grades could be posted online by the required date.

            “You know, sex requires energy,” Safu said.

            Shion was climbing into bed, not bothering to get undressed. He’d taken off his contacts, rubbed his dry eyes. “I’m sure I’ll be able to summon some when the time comes.”

            “You haven’t eaten since Saturday. It’s been six days, and for a month and a half before that, you were taking in an insubstantial fraction of the food you needed per day.”

            “I don’t need a reminder.”

            “Just take a pint of my – ”

            Shion stopped pulling his blanket over his shoulders and pushed himself up until he was sitting. “I told you I wouldn’t. Not anymore. You and Mom were drawing blood without even asking me, when I didn’t even need it. How could you do that, Safu? How could you let my mother do that?”

            “You think I can stop your mom from doing anything she can to protect you? And you need it now! It’s already out of us, it’ll just go to waste if you don’t take it.”

            “If I take it, you’ll just draw more blood, and so will Mom. I don’t want you doing that.”

            Safu pressed her lips together. “We never violated regulations. We both only drew blood every eight weeks.”

            “I don’t want it, Safu. I feel fine – ”

            “You feel a rush of endorphins because you’re making out with Nezumi all the time like a teenager. It’s masking the fact that you’re physically starving, and soon, the endorphins won’t be enough.”

            “I’m not drinking yours or Mom’s blood again,” Shion said, his voice hard. “Good night, Safu.”

            Safu went to the front door, but stopped with her hand on the knob. “He’ll notice if you pass out in the middle of sex, if that’s any imperative, since you seem to care more about that than your own health. I’ll leave the few pints we were able to fill in your apartment. Drink them if you want.”

            “I don’t want them, don’t bring them over here – ”

            “Good night, Shion,” Safu said curtly, then opened the door and slammed it behind her.

            Shion watched the closed door, then lay back down. If Safu brought over the blood, Shion knew he would drink it in a moment of weakness, his natural instincts to prevent himself from starving overriding his willpower. He lay still, seething at Safu and trying to think of some text he could send her to dissuade her decision to leave her and his mother’s blood in his apartment – but only for a minute or so, as he soon fell swiftly to sleep.

*

On a Friday in early June, the news declared it was the hottest day of the year.

            Nezumi felt it the moment he left the air-conditioned theater near midnight, after his last show for the night. Sweat pooled his skin underneath his t-shirt, and Nezumi lifted his arms to gather his hair into a bun, making sure to collect the strands that had already stuck to his neck.

            Shion hadn’t come to his show, but he hadn’t in a week despite the fact that they’d been “more than friends” for two weeks. Shion rarely left his apartment, and Nezumi didn’t see him often at the bakery. The university semester had just ended, and he wasn’t teaching a summer course.

            None of this surprised Nezumi. The man was losing energy at an alarming rate. Despite their new relationship, Nezumi had yet to do more than make out with the guy. Not that sex was on Nezumi’s mind – Shion’s starved look wasn’t necessarily conducive of arousal.

            Nezumi knew sex was on Shion’s mind, however, as Shion expressed the fact often, whenever Nezumi went to visit him at his apartment. Despite Shion’s constant insistence, Nezumi doubted Shion would even be able to stay awake for the act.

            Nezumi didn’t go home. He headed to Shion’s apartment, trying not to wonder what state he’d find Shion in that night. Shion would be asleep, and he never let Nezumi stay over when he slept, but Nezumi had swiped his key from Safu’s purse that morning at the bakery.

            If Shion was going to die soon, Nezumi wasn’t going to waste time away from him.

            By the time Nezumi got to Shion’s apartment, sweat coated him, stuck his t-shirt fabric to his skin and his bangs to his forehead. Nezumi pushed his hair off his face before slipping Shion’s key out his pocket, sticking it in the door lock. It turned easily, and Nezumi let himself into Shion’s small apartment.

            He wasn’t entirely sure why Shion lived in such a crappy building. It couldn’t be just a wish for proximity to Karan’s bakery and the university – Safu lived right across the street, and her apartment was much nicer.

            Nezumi assumed Shion was simply frugal. It wouldn’t surprise him. The man didn’t care much about spoiling himself, or taking care of himself at all, for that matter.

            Shion was lying in bed, curled up with blankets nearly up to his ears. It was the hottest night of the year, but Nezumi knew the man would be wearing several sweaters, sweatpants, and thick socks.

            Nezumi had no desire to wake him. Shion’s body was small, smaller curled up in a ball, and Nezumi had room to stretch out beside him on the bed after kicking off his boots. He didn’t need any of the blankets Shion hogged, and laid still, trying to cool off even though Shion’s apartment wasn’t air conditioned.

            Not a minute after Nezumi had laid down, Shion was shuffling, rolling over, facing Nezumi and opening his eyes. He squinted even though the room was dark.

            “Nezumi?” he mumbled. He reached up, freeing his arms from his blanket cocoon, and rubbing his knuckles over his eyes more roughly than he probably should have been.

            “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

            “I slept in my contacts,” Shion murmured.

            “That was stupid of you.”

            Shion dropped his hands from his face. “Safu told me her copy of my key was missing from her purse. I figured you took it.”

            “Do you mind?” Nezumi asked. The whites of Shion’s eyes were pink, probably from his contacts. Nezumi had no idea why the guy didn’t just take them out.

            “No. I’m happy you’re here. How was your show?” Shion asked. His voice was faint, but he still managed to smile his stupid smile.

            Nezumi shouldn’t have come. He should have been staying away from Shion. The guy was on the brink of death – why would Nezumi want to witness that? Why would Nezumi want to watch the man deteriorate right in front of his eyes?

            Nezumi turned on his side to look at Shion fully. Wanted to touch Shion, but most of the man was covered in blankets. Nezumi settled on kissing the professor, lightly. Shion’s lips were dry. His breaths were faint. Nezumi pulled back from him.

            “Professor. I don’t like this.”

            Shion nodded against his pillow. “I know,” he whispered.

            Nezumi wouldn’t kiss him again tonight. He’d let the man sleep. He looked so tired. “Don’t fall asleep in your contacts again.”

            “It’s okay. I want to be able to see you.”

            “You can’t see me if you’re sleeping.”

            “Let’s have sex,” Shion murmured.

            Nezumi couldn’t help but smile. The guy was so stupid. Nezumi hated him more than he could stand. Nezumi loved him somehow more than that. “You can barely keep your eyes open. Go to sleep, I’ll fuck you tomorrow.”

            “That’s what you always say,” Shion muttered. “What if one day, there is no tomorrow?”

            Nezumi stiffened. Made himself relax. “Not funny, professor.”

            “I’m not joking. I don’t want to die, but if I do, I want to have sex with you first.”

            “That’s a flattering bucket list you’ve got.”

            Shion looked as if he was fighting himself to keep his eyes on Nezumi. “I’ve never had sex before,” he said.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, Shion, I’m well aware. If you’d had sex with me, I think I’d remember, I’m not that promiscuous.”

            “With anyone. I’ve never had sex with anyone.”

            Nezumi was aware Shion had a strange sense of humor. Watched Shion carefully, waiting for another one of his stupid grins, but none came. “You’re serious.”

            “Yes.”

            Nezumi didn’t know what to do with this information.

            “Sex isn’t an unreasonable bucket list item, I don’t think,” Shion whispered.

            Nezumi took in Shion’s tired gaze. He had bags under his eyes. Nezumi hated the way he talked about death like it was something inevitable. He didn’t want to be involved in Shion’s bucket list. He didn’t want Shion to have a bucket list. The man wasn’t even twenty-eight. Too young to die, even though Nezumi was well aware that no one was too young to die.

            Still, he should have been doing anything he could to stay alive, but as ridiculous as Shion could be, Nezumi didn’t think the man wanted to die. Maybe he was doing everything he could to stay alive. Maybe everything just wasn’t working.

            “Okay,” Nezumi whispered.

            “Okay?”

            Nezumi fought the urge to argue with Shion, to inform him there was no rush to have sex, Shion was not going to die tomorrow, or any time soon, and if he said such a thing again, Nezumi would have to hit him.

            Instead, Nezumi said, “Let’s have sex. But if you’re too tired now, we can always – ”

            “I’m not,” Shion said. It was a lie. He was exhausted. Nezumi let the man lie to him.

            Nezumi sat up. Waited as Shion pushed himself up from the bed, peeling the blankets from his shoulders. He wore several sweaters as Nezumi had predicted.

            “You can leave those on if you want.”

            Shion looked down at his own hands curled around the hem of his top sweater. “I know I look – ”

            “I don’t care how you look. I don’t want you to be cold.”

            Shion chewed on his lip. Released it. “What about you?”

            Nezumi smiled wanly. “Whatever you want. It’s your party.”

            “Take off your clothes,” Shion told him, and Nezumi laughed, but he had to force it.

            He knew Shion liked his laugh. The professor had told him so himself – of course he had, with the way he said everything that was on his mind – so Nezumi would give it to him, even though he felt no inclination to laugh when Shion looked the way he did.

            Nezumi stripped, pulling off his shirt to see Shion leaning the other way, opening a drawer of his nightstand.

            “I got these,” Shion said, holding up a condom and a bottle of lube to show Nezumi before placing the items on top of his night stand beside his lamp.

            “Always prepared, aren’t you?” Nezumi tugged off his jeans and boxers.

            Shion had kicked his blankets down in order to take off his own sweats and briefs. He was wearing two pairs of sweatpants. He leaned forward to free them from where he must have tucked the ends into his thick winter socks. When he was undressed from the waist down, he pulled his knees to his chest, his sweatered arms wrapped around his bare calves, hugging them to his body.

            His legs were nearly as thin as his arms, his knees bony. His thick socks made his feet seem comically large compared to the rest of him.

            Shion tightened his arms around his legs. “When I said I never had sex – I’ve never done any of it, Nezumi. You were the first person I ever kissed. I’ve never done anything.”

            Nezumi didn’t let his surprise show. He was an actor. He would act as if he was unfazed. He would act as if looking at Shion didn’t scare the shit out of him. He would act as if he wasn’t relieved that Shion kept on his sweaters, that at least half of Shion remained covered, and Nezumi wouldn’t have to see more than he had to of the way Shion’s bones jutted against his skin.

            “What do you want to do now?” Nezumi asked, making sure to keep his voice even. He reached up, freed his hair from its bun. He wanted to feel Shion’s fingers running through it.

            Shion didn’t hesitate. “Everything.”  

            Nezumi smiled gently. “Sure, professor.” He moved closer to Shion, and Shion dropped his hands from his legs, let them fall onto the bed.

            Nezumi looked at nothing but Shion’s face. Kissed Shion gently.

            Nezumi didn’t know how many people he’d had sex with, how many times he’d had sex. It was never something important enough to keep count of. It was never something he cared very much about at all.

            Nezumi touched Shion’s cheek first. Down his neck. Had never treated sex like anything special, but he would change all of that now, he would let this be important, he would let this be something he cared about.

            Really, it wasn’t a matter of choice. Nezumi did care. Slid his hands down the front of Shion’s sweaters, terrified of the skin and bone that was underneath them, hiding his fear from Shion by lowering his face, kissing the underside of Shion’s jaw instead, kissing Shion’s neck until Shion pushed Nezumi back by his shoulders.

            Shion shook his head. “Lower,” he said, and Nezumi didn’t argue.

            Ducked down. Felt Shion’s fingers in his hair. Pressed his lips to the inside of Shion’s thigh. His skin was cold. Nezumi made sure to exhale hard on his skin, wanting to warm the man.

            “Lie back,” Nezumi told him, lifting his lips from Shion’s inner thigh, so Shion did, laid on his back but left his knees bent, and Nezumi stayed between them. Moved forward as he kissed up the inside of Shion’s leg. Felt Shion’s fingers tighten in his hair the higher he kissed until it hurt, but Nezumi didn’t complain, didn’t tell Shion to loosen his grip.

            Nezumi had given many blow jobs. He was never particularly interested in it, preferred to fuck men hard and be done with it, preferred not to stretch out the moments before the fucking. He didn’t give a shit about foreplay.

            With Shion, Nezumi took his time. Didn’t have any desire to speed through the process, and then he didn’t want to stop at all, not when Shion started making sounds, at first just his breaths getting louder, and then slips of his voice catching in his exhales, and then Nezumi’s name, broken syllables of it, and Nezumi dug his fingers into the sides of Shion’s thighs, trying to keep with the rhythm he could tell Shion wanted.

            “Nezumi, Nezumi – Shit – _Shit –_ ”

            Shion’s knees clenched together, squeezing the tops of Nezumi’s shoulders between them, and when Shion climaxed, his legs shuddering, Nezumi wasn’t even pissed at the guy for not warning him.

            Nezumi waited a moment to make sure Shion was finished completely before he pushed himself up, Shion’s legs falling onto the bed on either side of him. He reached for a tissue from Shion’s nightstand to spit into after wiping the side of his lips and cheek.

            Nezumi spit rather than swallowed out of habit, not because he still suspected Shion of having an STD – he was well aware that Shion would have told him, especially with this sort of activity. Whatever was going on with Shion was not something Nezumi could guess. It hardly seemed human, the speed at which he deteriorated.

            Nezumi looked at Shion’s face as he placed the tissue on Shion’s nightstand. The professor was covering his face with his hands.

            “You all right?”

            “How have I spent twenty-seven years of my life not doing that?” Shion said, voice muffled by his hands.

            Nezumi was still kneeling between Shion’s legs. He leaned forward until he hovered over Shion, one hand against the mattress beside Shion’s sweatered waist to keep him from falling on the man, the other reaching down to pull one of Shion’s wrists. “Thought you wanted to do everything, professor. Might be difficult now that you’re already finished.”

            When Nezumi freed one hand from Shion’s face, the man looked at him with parted lips, dazed eyes. Nezumi tried not to laugh.

            “It’s your fault,” Shion told him. “I told you I’ve never done anything sexual before, and you start with a blow job like that. How was I supposed to last?”

            “That was hardly five minutes.”

            “It was more than five minutes,” Shion argued.

            “Doubtful.”

            Shion reached up, wiped a few of his fingers over Nezumi’s chin. “You still had some on you,” he mumbled. “Was I supposed to warn you so I didn’t, you know, climax in your mouth?”

            “Would have been nice.”

            Shion covered his face again, and Nezumi forgot to stop himself from laughing this time. 

            “It’s fine, professor, I don’t mind. Stop hiding, it’s your turn now.”

            Shion lowered his hands. “I still want to have actual sex.”

            “I think you need some time to recharge. Lucky for you, I can last longer than five minutes.”

            “It wasn’t five minutes!” Shion protested, but instead of shouting, his voice was faint.

            Nezumi examined him. He looked more exhausted than before – not that he’d done any work.

            Nezumi sighed, sat up and looked amongst the blankets for his clothes.

            “What are you doing?”

            Shion was leaning up on his elbows, watching him.

            “Time for bed, you’re too tired. I’m not letting you get away with falling asleep mid-blow job. You can return the favor properly tomorrow.”

            “I’m not tired!”

            Nezumi didn’t bother with his jeans or t-shirt, settling on just his boxers – though it was too hot for those as well, but he didn’t need Shion groping him in the middle of the night. He was half-hard just from the noises Shion had made, and ignored it, figuring he’d wait until Shion fell asleep – which wouldn’t be long – and jerk himself off in Shion’s bathroom.         

            Nezumi found Shion’s briefs, held them up. “Get dressed or I’ll dress you myself.”                      

           “Don’t be an asshole, come on, Nezumi, I’m not tired.”

            “What’s the rush? You planning on dying before tomorrow?” Nezumi demanded.

            “Is this your plan? Stall having sex cause you think I’m only keeping myself alive until we fuck? I told you, I have no say in my health. There’s nothing else I can do.”

            Nezumi didn’t bother arguing. Shion was too weak for him to argue with.

            “Get dressed if you want me to sleep here tonight. If not, I’m leaving.”

            Shion glared at him – weakly – for a few seconds, then grabbed his briefs from Nezumi and pulled them on while Nezumi fixed a pair of Shion’s sweatpants, which were inside-out.

            “If I die before tomorrow, I hope you never forgive yourself,” Shion snapped, pulling on the sweats that Nezumi handed him, getting tangled, and Nezumi moved the man’s hands away to help him.

            “I’ll never forgive you, professor,” Nezumi corrected, and Shion’s glare softened, but Nezumi suspected that was only because of his exhaustion.

            Shion tugged on his second sweats, then laid back down, and Nezumi pulled the blankets back over Shion’s shoulders before he settled beside Shion’s swaddled body, positioning Shion’s second pillow under his own cheek.

            Nezumi had never slept beside Shion before. He’d never slept beside anyone since he was a kid, and no one was dead.

            “Nezumi,” Shion said, even though Nezumi had expected him to fall asleep immediately.

            “Go to sleep.”

            “Is that a burn scar on your back?”

            Nezumi opened his eyes to see that Shion still wore his contacts.

            “Yeah,” he said, after a moment.

            “Did you get it during the Great Slaughter?”

            Nezumi nodded, his cheek sliding against the pillow.

            Shion watched him with tired eyes. “How did you survive?”

            Nezumi considered not answering, letting Shion fall asleep before he could continue with his curiosity.

            But Nezumi had never talked about the Great Slaughter. He’d never wanted to. He’d never had a reason to. He’d never had anyone to speak about it to.

            Now he had Shion.    

            Nezumi slipped his arm beneath his pillow, slid an inch closer to Shion. “They attacked us a few times before the big massacre, before I’d been born. They’d killed some of us in the previous decades, turned others of us into more vamps. Everyone in my dynasty tried to figure out ways to keep them away. They tried the old wives’ tales shit – garlic, crosses, stupid things like that. None of it ever worked. And then my parents had an idea, but it wasn’t something everyone in the dynasty could do.”

            Shion’s dark eyes were sad. Nezumi wanted to turn away from them, to close his own eyes, but he didn’t.

            “They thought if we were attacked again, we should just disguise ourselves as vamps. The whole dynasty couldn’t do it, or the vamps would figure it out, so my parents didn’t tell anyone else. They made white wigs for us in secret, I don’t know where they got the white hair. Maybe they bleached their own hair and cut it off. My parents made two of these wigs. I had a sister,” Nezumi added, because he realized Shion didn’t know that. Nobody knew that.

            Shion said nothing. As tired as he looked, he didn’t take his eyes off of Nezumi.

            Nezumi curled his bare legs up. He felt colder, now, his sweat having cooled his body, and he was only wearing boxers. He wished he could slip under one of Shion’s blankets, but Shion needed them more.

            “We crushed berries to mimic those scars vamps get from drinking animal blood, you know? Not a lot of vamps had those scars back then before they were outcasted, but some did, and my parents thought it’d help our disguises. My sister and I thought it was a game. She liked the scars that looked like chicken pox, she thought they were funny, so I’d paint polka dots on her face and arms. She painted the snake-like scar on my skin because that was the one I liked, around my neck like vamps have it, and over my cheek. We practiced doing this for weeks. My parents made us have drills, timing us while we put on these wigs, drew scars on our skin, but we didn’t take any of it seriously. We thought it was fun. We were young.”

            Nezumi couldn’t stop now. He hadn’t thought about any of this in years, hadn’t let himself remember any of it, and now he wanted to. He wanted to remember his sister laughing as she looked at her berry-pocked reflection in the stream along the edge of the forest where they lived. He wanted to remember her small fingers on his neck, trying to get his scar just right. He wanted to remember them swiping the berries their parents had collected for them to crush into red paint, he wanted to remember one night when his father yelled at them for eating half the berries, when his mother had held his father’s arm to calm him, reminding his father that they were just children, they didn’t know better.

            Nezumi wanted to remember when it was all just a game. When it was fun, for Nezumi and his sister to don their vamp costumes and run around the forest, chasing each other, pretending to bite each other.

            Nezumi wanted to remember when he wasn’t scared of vamps. When they were like mythical creatures to him. When he’d never laid eyes on a real vamp, never seen that they were nothing like the games he played.

            They were merciless. Ruthless. Didn’t look human at all. Had blood on their faces, had hunger in their eyes.

            “You don’t have to tell me more.”

            Nezumi ignored Shion’s quiet words. Took a breath, let it out slowly, and kept remembering. “And then they came. In the attacks that came before, there’d only been a couple, but that night there were hundreds of them. They lit our homes on fire to lure us out. I grabbed the wig and the little container of mashed berries my parents had hid in my room before the fire got to them, but I got separated from my family. I looked everywhere for them. The wig wasn’t mine, it was for my sister. In her room, she had the wig for me. We were supposed to stick together, we were supposed to disguise each other, just like we did in the drills. I wanted to give it to her. I didn’t want it. I had only grabbed it for her,” Nezumi said, and he needed Shion to understand this because it was the truth – he was never supposed to survive alone.

            His eyes burned. He didn’t want to remember anymore. Regretted remembering anything because now he remembered everything, and he couldn’t stop.

            “Nezumi…”

            “I only put the wig on and wiped the berries on my face and neck to give myself time to find her. I wasn’t supposed to be the only one that survived. I wasn’t supposed to outlive her. That wasn’t what I wanted, Shion, I swear, I didn’t want that. I don’t know how they didn’t smell me, isn’t that what vamps do? Smell our blood, find us from the scent of it? Why didn’t they find me? Maybe I looked like them, maybe I had the hair and the scar, but I can’t understand how they still didn’t see that I was human. How can you not tell a vamp from a human? How can you not see the difference, when there’s nothing that’s the same between us?”

            Nezumi couldn’t even see Shion anymore. His eyes were wet, his vision blurred, but he could feel the rustle of the bed beneath him, could feel Shion’s shifting, then Shion’s fingers light on his cheek, wiping them when the tears dropped from his eyes.

            Nezumi could feel, too, when Shion came closer to him. When Shion’s blankets were over his body. He moved closer, curled into Shion. Pressed his face into Shion’s sweater, felt Shion’s fingers in his hair. Felt Shion’s heartbeat slowly thudding against his forehead and remembered how he’d searched among the piles of burning bodies for his sister and his parents, remembered how he’d found them, remembered how he’d pressed his hands to their chests, searched desperately for what came so easily from Shion’s heart.

            Nezumi inched upward, so his forehead was no longer against Shion’s heartbeat. If Shion’s heart gave out in the night, Nezumi didn’t want to feel the absence of it.

*

Shion woke early, a lifetime of waking early to prep the bakery overriding sleepiness from his hunger.

            Either that, or he was too hungry to sleep properly.

            He forgot his hunger instantly on remembering Nezumi had slept beside him. The man was wound around him, his hair plastered to his face and neck and shoulders and his body slick with sweat, which had wet the front of Shion’s own sweater and sweats and the bedsheet underneath Nezumi’s body. Shion reached up, pulled the blanket free from Nezumi’s shoulders to give him air. Shion himself felt perfectly warm – for the first time in a long time. Nezumi’s body heat had slipped through the fabric of his layers and coated his own skin.

            Shion examined Nezumi’s hair next, the way it stuck to his forehead and his cheeks, a few strands to his lips, along his jawline, around his neck like it might be strangling him. The strands were wet in clumps when Shion caught them in his fingers, tried to free Nezumi’s skin of them.

            He was tucking back the last of the strands from Nezumi’s cheek when Nezumi made a soft noise in his throat. Not a second later, his eyes opened.

            “Do you always get tangled in your hair like this?” Shion asked him quietly.

            “Your eyes are bloodshot,” Nezumi said back. His voice was hoarse, cracked and unused from sleep. He licked his lips, reached up to wipe sweat from his forehead.

            Shion ignored his comment. His eyes were dry and ached, but he’d take out his contacts and put in eye drops when Nezumi left.

            “It’s hot,” Nezumi murmured. He closed his eyes again. Shion had never been allowed to examine Nezumi at such a close range. His eyelashes were extremely long and not perfectly curled, but oddly bent on one side, and Shion realized he’d slept on them. There were remnants of eyeliner from his show the night before smeared on the thin skin under his eyes. His lips were dry. His eyebrows were thick and precisely shaped but for one single hair outside the careful borders that he must have missed while plucking.

            “Do you pluck your eyebrows, or do your make-up people do it?” Shion asked him.

            Nezumi didn’t open his eyes. Shion was glad for this. He didn’t need Nezumi examining his own face from this close proximity. Surely, Nezumi would notice everything just as Shion did. Maybe he would notice that the roots of Shion’s eyelashes and eyebrows were white, as it’d been a few days since he’d dyed them. Maybe he would notice that the hairs inside Shion’s nose were white, and Shion made a mental note to start dying them as well. Maybe he would notice where Shion hadn’t applied _Ghost Kiss_ well enough, which he hoped hadn’t rubbed off his scar in his sleep, or that _Ghost Kiss_ didn’t blend properly with his skin tone despite Shion’s careful choosing.

            “I only have one make-up person.”

            “That girl who was in your dressing room when I came to the theater. What was her name? Misaki?”

            “Why are you talking about Misaki at four in the morning?”

            It was six in the morning, but Shion didn’t correct Nezumi. He lifted his hand in front of Nezumi’s face again. Touched Nezumi’s eyelashes just to feel them, and Nezumi made another soft sound, unintelligible.

            “Does she pluck your eyebrows, or do you do it?”

            “She doesn’t like when I do it. She says I mess them up. They’re my own eyebrows, you’d think I’d be the expert.” Nezumi’s voice was sleepy and soft, erased any scorn or spite that Shion would have otherwise expected.

            Shion touched the eyelashes of both of Nezumi’s eyes before he slid his fingertip over Nezumi’s eyebrows.

            Nezumi said nothing. Shion touched Nezumi’s eyelids next, very gently, then traced down the bridge of Nezumi’s nose.

            “Do you notice how beautiful you are every time you look in the mirror, or are you used to it by now?” Shion touched Nezumi’s lips, felt the cracks in them, the wet of them because Nezumi had just licked them. He slid his fingers up, along Nezumi’s cheekbones. Sharp but not at all like Shion’s. Nezumi was healthy.

            “It’s too early to say stupid things like that,” Nezumi murmured, turning his cheek so his lips were against the pillow, so half his face was hidden now from Shion’s touch.

            Shion traced the curls of Nezumi’s ear. His earlobes were attached to the skin below them, while Shion’s own were separate.

            “I don’t think I’ll ever be used to it. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one day, I won’t even notice your beauty. Maybe one day, it won’t even take my breath away, and my heart won’t stop, and I’ll feel nothing but familiarity when I look at you,” Shion said quietly. Nezumi’s earlobes were soft when Shion rubbed the pad of his thumb over them. He trickled his fingers down Nezumi’s neck next.

            “I think that might be nice, to get used to you. I think that’ll mean we’ve been together for a long time. For years,” Shion said. He was looking at the hollow above Nezumi’s collarbone, where his fingers had fallen, but he could tell Nezumi’s eyes had opened now, that Nezumi was watching him with that careful gaze – dangerously careful, Shion knew.

            Shion let himself touch Nezumi a moment more. Wished he could lie beside the man forever, but he couldn’t, and he didn’t know if it was possible that they could even have years.

            Years was a long time. If Shion even survived it, he couldn’t let Nezumi watch him the way he did for years. Years was long enough for Nezumi to notice. To understand that the stereotypes of vamps he believed so strongly were wrong. To understand that a vamp could be mistaken for a human.

            Years were surely long enough, for Nezumi to look at Shion and see nothing but the truth.

            Shion took his fingers from Nezumi’s skin before they could travel down Nezumi’s chest, or along his shoulder to trace the lines of his arm. He sat up, pushing against the mattress. Sitting made him dizzy, and he didn’t move for a moment, let himself get used to the new position, before glancing down at Nezumi.

            Nezumi was looking up at him. He looked sleepy and peaceful. He looked beautiful in a way that took Shion’s breath away, in a way that stopped his heart, in a way that Shion knew he would always notice because he would never be allowed the time to get used to Nezumi, and to even want it was a foolish thing.

            Shion pulled his knees up to his chest. Rested his chin on them. “I’m going to shower,” he said.

            “I can join you.”

            “Go back to sleep, you’re still tired.”

            “Don’t go yet. Lie back down,” Nezumi said, reaching out, wrapping his fingers loosely around Shion’s ankle. There were layers of sweatpants between Nezumi’s fingers and Shion’s own skin, but Shion still wanted to shift toward the touch, still wanted to lie back down, to let Nezumi curl around him again, to let Nezumi’s sweat wet all of his clothes and Shion’s own skin.

            Already, Shion was feeling cold. Already, Nezumi’s warmth was gone from him.

            “I have to take my contacts out,” Shion said.

             “Take them out here.”

             “I can’t do it without a mirror.”

             “I’ll take them out for you.”

            “I don’t want you touching my eyes.”

            “I won’t hurt you,” Nezumi said. His voice was still soft from sleep. His hand was still around Shion’s leg. “You can trust me.”

            _Can I? Can I trust you with the truth?_

            Shion knew the answer already. Reached out to touch Nezumi’s cheek a moment more, then slid off the bed, and Nezumi’s hand released his ankle as if he hadn’t been holding on at all.

            “Go to sleep, it’s too early to get up. I’ll come right back,” Shion told him.

            Nezumi closed his eyes again. Reached with his eyes closed to gather the blankets around himself, even though Shion had felt Nezumi’s body heat, even though Shion knew Nezumi was incredibly hot.

            Shion stood still, watching Nezumi gather the blankets in front of him, hugging them to himself, pressing his face into them, winding his long legs around them. He made another sleepy sound, and then was breathing slowly, as if he was already asleep.

            He almost looked like a child this way. Small and harmless.

            Shion listened to Nezumi’s deepening breaths, then went to his bathroom. Locked the door behind him and looked at his face in the mirror. The whites of his eyes were pink. It took several tries to take out his contacts, which had nearly dried against the surface of them. Shion doused his sore eyes afterward with more eyedrops than the recommended dose.

            He turned on the shower to heat up while he brushed his teeth, then stepped in, scrubbed off his coating of _Ghost Kiss_ along with the scent of Nezumi, earthy, that lingered on his skin. When he got out of the shower, the room was steamy, but Shion couldn’t risk opening the door when he didn’t have his scar covered. He stood still for several minutes, waiting until the steam cleared, waiting until it was cool enough in the room for him to apply another coating of _Ghost Kiss_ without having to worry about it melting off his skin.

            Shion put in another pair of contacts and left the bathroom with his towel around his waist. Nezumi was still asleep, his breaths whistling faintly now, his body uncovered by the blankets, as all of it was bunched up in his arms and between his legs. Nezumi wore only boxers, and after Shion dressed, he walked around the bed. Against the fetal curl of Nezumi’s back was a large burn scar, a splatter of dark color, twisted skin that had hardened. It was larger than both of Shion’s hands.

            Shion went into the kitchen. Listened to the whistle of Nezumi’s breaths for a solid minute before opening a cupboard, shifting aside the props of food he had to reveal three oatmeal cans.

            Safu had stored hers and Karan’s blood within beakers inside these oatmeal cans. She had drawn three pints of her blood while Shion had been getting his supply from Discreet Meat, as had Shion’s mother.

            Shion reached into the cupboard. Listened again for Nezumi’s breaths. Opened one of the oatmeal cans and picked up a beaker, which was covered in several layers of plastic wrap. He removed the plastic wrap. Touched the edge of the beaker to his lips, listened for Nezumi’s breaths, then drank the pint quickly.

            There were five remaining pints, but Shion didn’t touch them. He closed the oatmeal can, pushed it to the back of the cupboard amongst the others, replaced the cans of beans and bags of rice and boxes of unpopped popcorn in front of them. He was still hungry, but the effects of the single pint were instant. Already, Shion’s dizziness had faded. Energy surged through his body. His heart beat harder, faster. Shion knew he would look different too – not healed completely, but drastically healthier.

            It would alarm Nezumi, but Shion would take that chance, just as he would give in now, drink Safu’s and his mother’s blood as long as it would last him, do whatever he could to stay alive.

            He was not staying alive just so he could live long enough to have sex with Nezumi. He was staying alive to survive, to keep Nezumi from losing anyone else.

            Shion refused to let Nezumi be left alone again. He would find a way to live forever, if Nezumi asked him to.

*


	9. Chapter 9

When Nezumi woke a second time an hour or so later, Shion was back in bed with him, but he looked drastically different.

            Nezumi, at first, thought he was still sleeping. But then Shion smiled his goofy grin at Nezumi, and Nezumi knew he could not dream that up.

            He sat up abruptly. The sheets beneath him were damp, and it was a moment before Nezumi realized it was from his own sweat.

            Shion sat up too. “It’s okay,” he said gently. His goofy smile was lesser now, even a little wary, but Shion was not the one with the right to be wary.

            “What the fuck, Shion?” Nezumi breathed.

            “It’s happened before. You’ve seen it before. I got better before, remember?”

            “It wasn’t this quick.”

            “It was.”

            “No, it wasn’t,” Nezumi snapped. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care what had happened before. Just a few hours ago, he’d woken up with Shion beside him, just as skeletal as he’d been the night before. Now, he was still skinny, sure, too skinny to be considered healthy, but he wasn’t skeletal. He wasn’t on the brink of death. The fear Nezumi had felt squeezing his chest at Shion’s deteriorating health should have been gone, but it wasn’t. If anything, Nezumi was more terrified at this nearly-healthy Shion in bed with him.

            “What is going on? Shion, this isn’t right – ”

            “Sometimes I get better, that’s how it works – ”

            “No sickness works like that!” Nezumi shouted. He felt his heartbeat in his throat. He was terrified – if Shion could get better so drastically so quickly, he could get worse too. He could die in an instant, without warning – right?

            Shion reached out, touched Nezumi’s arm, but Nezumi flinched away, slid back and scrambled quickly off Shion’s bed, nearly falling, righting himself.

            “You have to tell me what’s going on. I was so goddamn scared you were going to die last night, Shion, don’t you know that? I’ve never felt so – And now you’re – Is this a game to you? Is it entertaining to you, to watch me worry myself shitless while you waste away, and then at the last second, bounce right back? What the fuck is going on? What the fuck are you trying to do to me?” Nezumi knew he was shouting. He couldn’t stop himself. He felt like he was going crazy. He swore, Shion had just been corpse-like. He swore, Shion had just been about to die.

            Kneeling in the middle of the bed, looking at Nezumi with worry, that was not a man who was about to die. It was a man who was a little skinnier than he should have been, but otherwise fine. Otherwise, the picture of health.     

            Nezumi felt scattered. Unsure. Insane.

            “Nezumi, listen to me. I would never do anything to hurt you. This isn’t a game, this isn’t fun for me, I hate doing this to you. I want to tell you, but I can’t, and you just have to trust me – ”

            “Trust you? I told you everything! I told you everything, and you’ve told me nothing. I’ve never met a man with so many secrets, and at first it was intriguing, sure, a little bit of a mystery, I’ll give you that, but it’s not cute anymore. It’s insane and impossible, and I don’t deserve this shit, I don’t deserve to have no idea if you’re going to be dead or perfectly fine an hour from now – ”

            Shion had gotten off the bed, was coming closer to Nezumi, who stepped back from him. “Nezumi – ”

            “Why won’t you tell me? I thought – I thought you – You spew bullshit every five minutes that I mean so much to you, all that crap you say, and I thought – ” Nezumi shook his head. His back was against Shion’s wall. He felt too panicked, and tried to calm down, was not used to feeling so much, had not felt so much in over twenty years.

            Shion’s eyes were wet. They weren’t even bloodshot anymore, and Nezumi wondered if he’d just imagined it, if he’d imagined everything – maybe he was going crazy. Maybe Shion made him crazy. That made more sense than that the professor could look like this after he’d just looked like he was going to keel over a few hours before – hadn’t it just been a few hours before?

            Nezumi had no idea what time in the morning it was. He didn’t bother asking. No time would make this make sense but months or years.

            “I promise, Nezumi, I promise, I’m not keeping this from you to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to keep anything from you, but I just can’t tell you this one thing, I wish I could – ”

            “I told you everything,” Nezumi said again, and his voice came out smaller than he’d intended it to. He felt small. He felt clueless and stupid.

            “I know. I know,” Shion said, and he was crying, tears slipping from his eyes to streak his cheeks, and his cheeks were hollow but not nearly as bad as they’d been when Nezumi had given the man a blow job the night before, not nearly as bad as they’d been when Nezumi had woken earlier that morning to Shion’s fingers on his face, shifting his hair, touching his eyelashes, to Shion calling him beautiful like it wasn’t a compliment, like it was just a fact.

            “Why is it a secret?” Nezumi asked. He took deep breaths, made himself speak evenly, calmly. He felt unhinged and tried not to. He hadn’t given a shit about another person in years, and he knew that Shion had changed things, he had long since understood that the way he felt for Shion would make his life more difficult and uncertain, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this, it wasn’t supposed to be so goddamn terrifying. “Safu knows, and your mother knows. Why can’t you tell me?”

            Shion wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. “Please trust me. Nezumi, you have to just trust me. I’m healthy now, and this is a good thing. I’ll be getting better now, and this is a good thing.”

            “That’s not an answer.”

            Shion said nothing. Nezumi pressed himself against the wall behind him. He wanted to walk away from Shion. He wanted to tell Shion to get lost, to either tell the truth or forget about Nezumi. He wanted to tell Shion that his secrets were no longer worth his time, but Nezumi couldn’t do that.

            Nezumi didn’t want to be forgotten, and what else would he do with his time now, if not give it to Shion? He couldn’t remember what he’d done with his time before. He had no idea how he’d lived his life before Shion, and he couldn’t take the chance of asking Shion to choose between himself or his secrets. Nezumi didn’t know what Shion would choose. He’d thought he understood Shion, but maybe he knew nothing, really, about the man.

            “Let me have this one secret, and I will give you everything else,” Shion insisted, his voice almost desperate – but Nezumi didn’t want his desperation. He just wanted the truth. “I promise, Nezumi. I know you have no reason to trust me. But I’m asking you to anyway.”

            Nezumi had no reason to put up with Shion’s bullshit. He had no reason not to leave a guy whose secrets were clearly more important to him than anything else. He had no reason to give Shion a chance – but that if he didn’t, he’d be alone again, his life would go back to normal again.

            Normal meant he wouldn’t be terrified that Shion would die, but he wouldn’t ever fall asleep again beside Shion either. Normal meant that he wouldn’t be confused and uncertain and lied to constantly, but he wouldn’t be anything else either.

            Nezumi had spent so long feeling nothing at all, and maybe it was safer than feeling everything Shion put him through, but it wasn’t any more bearable. It wasn’t bearable at all.

            Shion stepped forward again, and then again, and then he was right in front of Nezumi, and then he was reaching up, tucking Nezumi’s hair behind his ear, and Nezumi didn’t move away from him.

            He wanted to, he wanted to get the hell away from Shion.

            But so much more than that, he wanted to stay.

*

“I’m in love with Nezumi.”

            Karan finished weaving the strip of dough she held into the pie crust before looking at Shion. “I know, honey,” she said gently.

            Shion tightened his fingers around the dishtowel he was supposed to be drying dishes with. “I want to tell him.”

            “That you love him?” Karan asked. She picked up another strip of dough. Began weaving it carefully, slowly, even though Shion knew she could do the task much more quickly.

            “The truth. What I am.”

            Karan was silent. Finished weaving the strip of dough. Picked up another, then placed it back down. Her eyes were sad on Shion’s. “I’m sorry, hon. You know you can’t.”

            Shion ignored the tightening of his stomach. “It’s different now. He loves me too, I know it. However upset he’ll be, however betrayed, I can make him see that not all vamps are like the ones he’s known.”

            “I know you think you can make him understand. But Nezumi has gone through a terrible trauma. There is no reason for him to think of vamps as anything but evil.”

            “I’m the reason,” Shion insisted, squeezing the dishtowel more tightly.

            “He witnessed terrible things. The anger he feels, the hatred, it’s not the same as most people’s, Shion. It comes from experience. It comes from great loss. It’s unfair to ask Nezumi to equate the vamps who murdered his family with humans. It’s unfair to tell him he’s wrong when he’s spent his life justifying the horrible things that happened to him the only way he knows how, the only way that can make sense to him.”

            “It’s unfair for him to think all vamps are like those who hurt him!” Shion argued, amazed at his mother’s words. She always was the one to call vamp haters ignorant. She always was the one to be angry at those small-minded enough to believe the stereotypes.

            “Honey, listen to me. Can you imagine how painful it must have been for him to watch everyone he knows be killed in such a gruesome, unspeakable way? He was so young when it happened, and the way he learned to deal with the loss that might have crippled any other child with less strength than Nezumi was to assume it was not a choice for the vamps. It must be easier to believe that vamps killed everyone he knew because they are wired for it, it is their instinct, it is their nature. It must be easier to accept that his family is dead not out of the choice of hundreds of vampires to murder them, but because it was never a choice to begin with. That it was animal instinct rather than deliberate, calculated slaughter.”

            “But – ”

            “If you tell him what you are, if you show him that vamps can be humane, vamps can be kind, vamps can be loving, vamps can be harmless, that will mean the Great Slaughter was not an inevitable course of nature. It will mean that a group of vampires thought long and hard about targeting Nezumi’s family, that they intentionally took every life, thousands of lives, even the lives of children. It will mean there is evil in this world so great to lead to such a terrible thing.”

            Shion stepped closer to his mother, set down the dishtowel on the counter. “Nezumi isn’t a child anymore. He doesn’t need to be protected anymore. He should know the truth. He would want the truth.”

            “I don’t think he would,” Karan said gently. “It’s easy to look at Nezumi and think he’s given up on the idea of good in the world. But I don’t think he has. He looks at you, and he sees someone good, Shion. If you tell him that every single one of those vamps didn’t have to kill his family, that they could have chosen not to, that they could have easily stepped away, you want to believe he’ll think of vamps as having the capacity for good, but he won’t see it like that. He’ll think vamps are even more evil. That they are heartless enough to kill even when they don’t have to.”

            “You don’t know that. How can you know what he’ll think?” Shion demanded.

            “Because I thought the same way for a long time.”

            Shion stared at his mother, who looked at him for a long moment before reaching up, untying her apron.

            “Come, let me show you something.”

            Shion followed his mother numbly out the kitchen. Up the stairs to her bedroom, where she pointed to the bed, so Shion sat on the edge of it, watched his mother rummage in the bottom drawer of her dresser, underneath stacks of clothing.

            She brought out a little photo album. Sat beside Shion on the bed and handed him the album.

            “Go on,” she said, when Shion just stared at its cover, a worn brown leather.

            Shion opened it. Looked at the first page, then flipped it, kept flipping. On every page were pictures of a man Shion had only seen in one photograph that his mother had given him when he was much younger.

            “My dad,” he said, flipping more slowly now, going back to the beginning to start again more carefully. In some photographs, Shion’s father was with Karan. In others, he held a little boy, just a baby, and Shion knew that was himself.

            “I told you he died of a heart attack when you were a few months old, but that isn’t true. I didn’t want to tell you the truth. I didn’t want you to hate who you are.”

            Shion looked up at his mother. Her gaze was on the photo album, her fingers trailing the pictures.

            “Are you saying – Are you saying a vamp killed him?”

            Karan didn’t look up from the album. When she spoke, it was evenly, almost without emotion, in a tone Shion had never heard from her before. “I was buying groceries. When I came home, he was already dead, there wasn’t even any blood left in his body. The vamp, a young girl, she couldn’t have been older than a teenager, she ran when I walked into the kitchen. But before she ran, we both stared at each other in shock, for just a few seconds. There was blood all over her face, a little on the collar of the shirt she wore. I’ll never forget.”

            Shion let the words settle, let himself take a moment to absorb this new truth, but it was difficult to think of it as the truth. It was easier not to think of his father’s death at all. “And she had bitten me too,” Shion said, to change to topic to himself, but his mother shook her head.

            “No, not that day. You were safe, you were still human and in your room, fast asleep, a little baby. I’d never given much thought to vamps and their nature before that day. It was several years before the Great Slaughter, but there were still many vamp killings worldwide. Small ones, with only a dozen or so victims, nothing like the thousands that died in the Great Slaughter, so most people didn’t think of vamps as any different than humans, who are of course on occasion responsible for murder as well.”

            Shion nodded. He knew all of this.

            “I started having nightmares about that young vamp, the blood on her face and her shirt. I started believing they were evil, and this was a time when believing vamps were evil was rare. But to see my husband, the man I loved more than I’d imagined I could love another person, lying bloodless on my kitchen floor, it changed me. You think you love Nezumi, and I believe you, honey, but yours is a young love, its new and uncertain, it hasn’t had room to grow as yet. I loved your father nearly all my life, we grew up next to each other as kids, and he was my best friend in childhood. I loved him so much I wondered if we could even call it love, if it was something else entirely, something no two people had ever experienced before we found it in each other.”

            When Karan had previously mentioned Shion’s father, it had been fleeting, brief comments, nothing substantial – _Oh, look at those flowers. Your father loved asters._ Or – _I think I’ll add blueberry muffins back to the menu. Those were your father’s favorites, you know._

            Shion had never thought of his mother as someone with the capacity to be in love, a head over heels love, a passionate, desperate love. He’d never even considered that she might know what he felt for Nezumi, that she might know beyond that, a love that had time, a love that didn’t have secrets.

            “To see a vampire standing above this man I’d loved my whole life with his blood on her face, it was so much easier for me to think of her as more monster than human. It was so much easier to believe that the father of my child had died not because someone made the choice to kill him, but because someone had no choice in the matter. Your father was a good man. Who could choose to hurt him? Who could choose to take his life? Certainly, I thought, no one with a rational mind. No one with rational thoughts. No one with the ability to think like a human could, to think reasonably.”

            Karan was no longer looking at the photographs. Her gaze was hard on Shion’s, and her eyes were bright. Shion had never heard his mother speak of vampires this way. He understood, now, why she’d lied to him about his father’s death beforehand.

            All he felt, hearing his mother’s words, was shame. All he felt was anger, not with her, but with himself, with all vampires, with anyone who could make his mother feel this way, anyone who could take from his mother someone she had loved so hard and for so long.

            Karan’s touch startled Shion. He looked down to see her fingers wrapping around his own. He wanted to move away, but her grip was strong.

            “It was two years later when the vamp came back. The same girl. I recognized her, even though she was older. I’d become scared since what happened to your father. I’d closed the bakery for those two years. I never left the house, and I never left you. You can’t remember this time, you were so young, but I was a different person for those years. I was angry and frightened, and that changes a person. I trusted no one. I had a lot of hatred in me. I had a lot of anger.”

            “Mom – ”

            “Honey, I know it’s hard to hear, but I have to tell you this. You have to understand. That same vamp, she broke into the bakery again while I was making you a cherry pie. It used to be your favorite, and you’d sit on the counter of the kitchen and sneak cherries while I baked. Even though the bakery was closed to everyone else, I still baked for you.”

            Shion squeezed his mother’s hand back. He wanted to remember and he wanted to forget. He wanted his mother to stop speaking and he wanted to hear everything.

            “I heard a crash at the front, and before I could hide you, the vamp was in the kitchen. I had you behind me, but when I turned to grab a knife, you ran out from my legs. There was a cherry on the floor of the kitchen by the vampire, and you wanted it. She bit you before I could do anything. Before I even realized you weren’t behind me any longer. Before I even saw she was the same vamp as before. When I realized, I couldn’t think any longer. I don’t even remember stabbing her with the kitchen knife. I don’t even remember her releasing you and running away. All I remember was cleaning the poison that had dripped out the wound I must have given her off my kitchen floor.”

            It took Shion a moment to find his voice. “You didn’t tell me that. You told me I was bitten when I was playing outside one day, by a vamp you never saw.”

            Karan nodded. “I know. I didn’t want you to think I’d hurt a vampire. I didn’t want you to think I wanted to kill a vampire once, that I had the capacity to feel that kind of hatred, that I had such a desperation to take a life.”

            Shion swallowed. “What changed? What changed how you thought about vamps?”

            At this, Karan smiled slightly. “You did. You were a vampire then, of course. The next day, twenty-four hours later, your hair changed to white, and your eyes were red. But otherwise, you were the same little boy you’d always been. You had the same little laugh, and you were still adventurous, fearless, stubborn, curious. You didn’t like cherry pie anymore, but you were still my Shion. I didn’t know how to hate you, honey. I didn’t know how to stop loving you, or to be fearful of you, or to want you dead or hurt or locked away. So I stopped being scared of vampires. I began to understand that the vamp who’d killed your father, who’d come back again and bitten you, she’d made choices. It wasn’t her nature to do these things, it was her choice.”

            Shion took a deep breath. Thought about his mother’s words and remembered why she’d told him this truth to begin with. “So you felt better. After realizing not all vamps were evil. You were no longer scared, you opened up the bakery again.”

            “Honey, it was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I had no way to justify what happened to your father. I wondered for years why he was attacked. I wondered for years why that young vamp came into my bakery and took his life. I wondered why she came back, why she came after you. I wondered if it was because of me – did she hate me? Did she used to come to the bakery, had I said something to her once that made her despise me, that made her want to hurt me, that made her want to take away the people I loved? I began to blame not her, but myself, for what happened to your father, what almost happened to you.”

            Shion felt his eyebrows crease. “You would never have made anyone hate you, how can you have thought – ”

           “I thought a lot of things, Shion, trying to understand why this vampire had killed your father and returned two years later to try to kill you. I still don’t have answers, and I don’t think I ever will, but I’ve moved on, I’ve realized that to obsess over this vampire who changed my life is not healthy. Nezumi lost everyone he ever knew. He was alone for a very long time afterward. Our stories are similar, but they are not at all the same. I was able to move on, but it will be so much harder for Nezumi to do the same, to stop wondering if he finds out that vampires make choices just like humans do. Nezumi is certain in his anger and his hatred, and maybe it’s wrong for him to be that way, but it’s easier too. Don’t you think he deserves to have an easy life now? Don’t you think he’s been through enough hardship?”

            “But his life is no longer easy! Because of me!” Shion said, standing up, tossing the photo album on the bed he vacated. “He’s confused now, he doesn’t understand why I won’t trust him, why I won’t be honest with him. He deserves to be told the truth!”

            “He spent twenty years – twenty-one years, now, the anniversary of the Great Slaughter is almost here, I’d almost forgotten – he spent so long believing in one thing, and that one thing gave him the strength to survive.”

            “It’s a strength based on hatred,” Shion argued, watching his mother stand up, look at him sadly.

            “I wouldn’t have survived losing your father if I didn’t have you, and I was a grown woman. Nezumi had no one, and he was a child. I cannot begrudge him for finding strength the only way he knew how.”

            “He’s not a child anymore! He’s not alone anymore!”

            “You are thinking of yourself, Shion. It will be easier for you not to have to lie to him. But what about Nezumi? None of this will be easier for him. Honey, I know this is hard, I know you love him and you think that love depends on honesty, but it doesn’t always. I love you more than anything in this world, and I never told you the truth about your father and how you were bitten because I worried it taint how you thought of vampires.”

            “But you told me now, because you know I can handle the truth now, you know I’m old enough.”

            “I told you now so you would see that I understand this more than you can. I understand Nezumi, I understand that his hatred is his only comfort, I understand that he will not want to give up his hatred just because you tell him the truth. You are the evidence of goodness in vampires, and that was enough evidence for me, but it will not be enough for Nezumi. I had to come home to one dead body, but Nezumi had to witness thousands of violent, brutal deaths. He will not see you as I did, as proof of anything good. He will see you as a liar because it will be easier than seeing you as the truth. He will see you as the evil he saw when he was a little boy because it will be easier than knowing the hatred that has comforted him all these years is wrong. He will not trust you, and he will report you to Vamp Hunters, I have no doubt about that. I will not lose you, Shion. I have protected you your whole life, and just as I protected you from that vampire, I will protect you from Nezumi.”

            Shion fought to catch his breath. “So you don’t really care about Nezumi at all. All that stuff you said, you just don’t want me to tell him because you’re scared of what he’ll do to me.”

            Karan’s stern expression softened, just for a second. “I do care about him. When you brought him to this bakery that first day, I couldn’t understand how you could risk your secret and your life for a boy, but I understand now. I see how he has made you happy, I see how he looks at you, I see how he is kind and gentle and capable of incredible selfless love despite his best efforts to hide these things about himself. Believe me, Shion, I care about Nezumi more than I wish I did. But I have to care about you more. You are my son, Shion. You are all I have left.”

            Shion had never seen his mother cry before, not since he could remember, and he wanted to look away from her, but he forced himself to keep her gaze. “Mom, he won’t stay if I keep lying to him. We can never make this work if I have to lie about who I am forever, and I can’t be happy without him.”

            “It will amaze you, what you can be happy without,” Karan replied. Her voice was hard now. Shion felt his breath leave his lungs. “I had to relearn happiness without your father, and I did it. I never wanted you to feel this way, Shion, but if the alternative is being found, being killed for being a vampire, then you have to choose heartbreak. You deserve better than to die for a man who will never be able to understand you. It is not Nezumi’s fault, and it is not your fault. But it’s still the reality, it’s still the choice you have to make.”

            Shion shook his head. “I thought you would understand. I thought you would want me to be happy, Mom.”

            “You cannot be happy if you’re dead, and Nezumi is not a man who has ever been allowed to learn mercy. You are being foolish to think he will not report you to Vamp Hunters,” Shion’s mother said roughly, and Shion didn’t recognize the hardness of her expression, the coldness of her voice.

            He looked at her a moment more, waiting for her expression to soften, but when it didn’t, he turned away from her, left her room, went downstairs, left the bakery.

            He wanted to go straight to the theater, where he knew Nezumi would be in rehearsal, but Shion did not know how to ask Nezumi to comfort him when he couldn’t even explain to Nezumi why he needed comfort in the first place.

            Shion headed to Safu’s office building instead. As much as he was desperate to trust Nezumi, to at the very least, give Nezumi the chance to be trusted, Shion couldn’t get his mother’s words out of his head – _You deserve better than to die for a man who will never be able to understand you._

           Shion hated his mother’s certainty that Nezumi would not be able to understand him, would not be able to understand that Shion was different from the vamps of his past. Shion hated his mother’s certainty that Nezumi’s only reaction to the truth would be to hurt Shion. Shion hated that his mother could distrust Nezumi so completely, could have no faith in him at all, and Shion wanted to be able to argue back that she was wrong with just as much certainty as she possessed.

            But he couldn’t. Shion felt no certainty at all. And in truth, when Shion thought about admitting to Nezumi that he was a vamp, what he felt most, overwhelmingly, was fear.

*

Nezumi found Shion outside the theater when he left rehearsal. The man stood against the brick wall of the building, layered in his sweaters despite the unbearable heat but still appearing as healthy as he’d seemed after his abrupt recovery that morning.

            “Hi,” Shion said. His smile was small, hesitant.

            “I was going to come to the bakery,” Nezumi said, walking past him, but Shion quickly caught up, fell into step beside him.

            “I didn’t know if you would. I didn’t know if we were okay after…”          

            “After you decided it wasn’t worth it to tell me your little secret? I didn’t tell you to fuck off this morning, did I? Guess that means we’re okay.”

            Shion was silent.

            Nezumi glanced at his profile. The professor looked upset for a guy who’d just experienced some kind of miracle health boost.

            Nezumi sighed. Elbowed him. “Relax. I told you we’re fine. I’m a little pissed at you, but you’re going to have to deal with that. You’re not allowed to sulk.”

            The skin of Shion’s cheek flinched, and then the man relaxed. “I know you have a right to be angry with me. I shouldn’t sulk, you’re right.”

            “I usually am.”

            Shion glanced at him. “Even though you’re mad, and you’re entitled to be mad, can I hold your hand?”  

            Nezumi laughed before he was able to stop himself, and the worried crease between Shion’s eyes softened. “You can do whatever you want, professor.”

            Shion’s cold fingers fell into his, curled lightly, barely there. His cool skin felt good in the heat.

            “You still have Safu’s key,” Shion said. “I just visited her at work and she reminded me. I should get that back from you.”

            “Or you could let me keep it,” Nezumi said lightly.

            He was aware of Shion staring at him, and kept his gaze straight ahead.

            “Maybe that’s moving quickly,” Shion suggested.

            “I don’t think so. I’ve known you a while.”

            “We haven’t even had sex yet.”

            “I was under the impression that was going to happen tonight. At the very least, you owe me a blow job, don’t you forget.”

            “I haven’t forgotten. I want you to spend the night again tonight, and I was going to ask you that. Whenever you want to stay, you can, but I’d rather I was there to let you in. I didn’t think having my key would be important to you, anyway.”

            “You don’t want to give me the key so I can’t barge in when you’re doing whatever secret healing ritual you’ve got.”

            “There’s no healing ritual.”

            Nezumi pulled his fingers to loosen them from Shion’s, but Shion’s tightened at that moment. Nezumi glared at him. “Don’t lie to me, Shion. Keep your secret, but don’t lie to me about it. You’re not giving me the key so you have warning before I come over, and you can keep your precious secret safe.”

            “Fine. Yes, you’re right. So can you give it back? I’ll always let you in when you ask, and I’ll always want you with me, but I just need to know when you’re coming over, that’s all.”

            Nezumi looked away from him again. Clenched his jaw, felt Shion squeeze his fingers.

            “I know it’s unfair,” he said quietly.

            “Will you ever tell me?”

            “I don’t know. I haven’t even known you a year.”

            “When we’ve known each other a year, will you tell me?” Nezumi asked. He kept his tone light. He didn’t want to argue with Shion again. He didn’t want to get into all of it. He didn’t want to piss himself off, to doubt what he was doing with Shion, to wonder why the hell he was even bothering with Shion.

            It was a useless thing to wonder. Either way, Nezumi knew he would stay.

            “I don’t know. That’s still in another six months. We met at the end of November.”

            “I was stalking your lectures long before that,” Nezumi reminded, peeking at Shion to see his small smile.

            “I don’t think that counts.”

            “Hmm,” Nezumi hummed, feeling Shion’s fingers relax in his, then weave more fully through his own until their palms were pressing together.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure that he’d ever held anyone’s hand in his life. Maybe his parents. It wasn’t bad. He could see why people bothered, why it was sort of nice to have this small point of contact.

            “You said this morning that you don’t deserve not to know if I’ll be dead or alive in the next time you see me – ”

            “We don’t have to talk about it. I’d prefer not to, actually,” Nezumi interrupted.

            “I know. Me too. But I just want to tell you. I’ll let you know. If I’m going to get sicker again, I’ll know, and I’ll tell you. So you can be prepared. So you don’t have to be unsure. It won’t happen for a while. I’ll be okay for a while, I’ll be getting better.”

            “And you just know that. Even though before your magical health surge this morning, you were convinced you were going to die.”

            “Yes. Please don’t ask me to explain it. We can stop talking about it now, if you want, I just don’t want you to be worried.”

            Nezumi exhaled hard. “You’re an extremely frustrating person.”

            “I know.”

            “Saying you know only makes it more annoying.”

            “I know,” Shion said, and Nezumi narrowed his eyes at the man’s small smile. Shion bit his lip, but his smile grew anyway.

            Shion started rambling on about the courses he was going to be teaching when the fall semester started up again, and Nezumi let him ramble, both annoyed and relieved that Shion had changed the topic to something harmless.        

            When they got to the bakery, Shion released Nezumi’s hand before leading him inside. He didn’t greet his mother as usually did on the way in, but she still looked at them.

            “Hi, Karan,” Nezumi said.

            Karan nodded but said nothing. Her soft gaze was sharper than usual, but Shion’s hand quickly found Nezumi’s again, pulled him through the front room into the kitchen.

            “Something going on with your mother?” Nezumi asked, while Shion washed his hands first.

            “No.”

            “Another secret then.”

            Shion sighed. “It’s not a secret. We had a fight this morning. Mothers and sons fight, you know.”

            “I wouldn’t know, actually. Been a bit out of practice,” Nezumi commented. He ignored the way Shion looked at him, pushed the man out of the way so he could wash his own hands.

            “She doesn’t think we should be in a relationship,” Shion finally said.

            Nezumi glanced at him before turning back to the soap on his hands. “Because I’m a man?”

            “Of course not, Nezumi.”

            “Don’t say of course not like that, I was giving you the option to give me a normal response,” Nezumi said, shutting off the faucet.

            “You said you didn’t want me to lie to you. She’s not homophobic.”

            “I’m guessing you can’t tell me the reason.”

            Shion sighed. “I wish I could.”

            “Stop sighing. If anyone has a reason to sigh, it’s me,” Nezumi said sharply.

            “She thinks you’re dangerous for me.”

            Nezumi stopped drying his hands on the dishtowel he took from Shion. “What does that mean? She thinks I’ll hurt you?”

            Shion took the dishtowel back from Nezumi. Hung it on its rack and got two aprons for them, holding one out for Nezumi, not meeting his eye.

            Nezumi didn’t take the apron. “Shion. Look at me. Your mother, sweet and loving Karan, thinks I’m going to hurt you?”

            “She’s wrong. That’s why we were fighting this morning,” Shion said.

            Nezumi felt strange, a heat over his skin. Karan wasn’t the kind of person with the capacity to dislike anyone. Nezumi couldn’t imagine why she would think of Nezumi as a threat, not unless Shion had given her reason to. “Do you think that? Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”

            “No, Nezumi,” Shion said, too emphatically.

            “Shit, Shion,” Nezumi breathed.

            “I don’t! That’s why we were arguing, I just told you that!”

            “Why would you want a relationship with me if you think I’m, what, going to beat you? You think I’m some creep?”

            Shion frowned. “Now you’re jumping to conclusions, it’s nothing like that.”

            “Then what’s it like?” Nezumi demanded.

            “She doesn’t think you’re going to beat me, Nezumi, will you stop being so dramatic about everything,” Shion snapped, throwing the apron Nezumi still hadn’t taken at his chest and walking away, to the fridge which he wrenched open hard enough to make the bottles on the door jostle and clink together.

            “What, then? Oh, I see, she thinks I’ll get sick of your little secret and I’ll leave you, and you’ll be heartbroken, that’s it,” Nezumi said.

            Shion sighed into the fridge. Another sigh. Nezumi had no idea how Shion was sighing like that and then going around accusing him of being dramatic.

            “Is that it, Shion?” Nezumi pressed.

            “Yeah, that’s it,” Shion said softly to the fridge.

            “I’m not going to insult your mother, I personally have no fault with her, but that’s a bit unfair to me, don’t you think?”

            “Yes, it is unfair,” Shion said, reaching into the fridge, pulling out a bowl with a Post-It that labeled it _Cookie Dough._

            Nezumi watched him for a moment, then stooped down, grabbed the apron that’d fallen after Shion threw it at him, pulled it over his neck. “Even if it’s unfair, you shouldn’t be getting into fights with your mother over me. She just wants what’s best for you.”

            Shion pointed at him. “Of course you’d take her side. She’s not even on your side, but you’re taking her side.”

            “She’s a mother, she’s supposed to protect you.”

            “I don’t need to be protected from you!” Shion shouted, then seemed to realize he’d shouted, had the decency to look sheepish about it. “Can we just bake? Can we not fight?”

            “You started it.”

            “I started it?” Shion demanded, his voice rising again. “I did not – ” Shion froze, took a breath, let it out slowly. “Okay, you’re right, I started it. Now let’s make cookies. Can we do that?”

            “Sure, professor,” Nezumi replied, and Shion watched him suspiciously before turning back to the cookie dough.

            Nezumi could see the way Shion remained tense, his shoulders stiff, his smile absent, so he shaped his cookies in hearts after Shion got out the tray, and after noticing, Shion’s expression softened.

            “They won’t cook evenly in that shape,” he commented, peeking at Nezumi, who didn’t stop shaping his third heart.

            “Fix them, then,” he told Shion, but Shion didn’t touch Nezumi’s cookies.

            He started turning his own circles into hearts – much better hearts than Nezumi had managed – and soon he was making fun of Nezumi’s messy hearts, smiling his stupid smile again, and for a moment, Nezumi was almost convinced that everything was perfect, and nothing was wrong.

*

Shion had no idea that giving a blow job was so exhausting. He sat up, rubbed his lips, breathed hard as he stared at Nezumi, who was lying naked on his back on Shion’s bed.

            Nezumi looked up, raised an eyebrow. “Why’d you stop?”

            “Why is nothing happening?” Shion demanded.

            “What’s supposed to be happening?” Nezumi asked, sounding confused.

            “You’re supposed to cum!” Shion snapped.

            Nezumi reached out, picked up his phone from Shion’s nightstand. “It’s only been ten minutes.”

            “I’m supposed to give you a blow job for longer than ten minutes?” Shion asked, incredulous, and Nezumi sat up.

            “You’re not supposed to do anything. If you wanted to stop, you should have stopped. Unlike you, for me, sex isn’t a thrilling and overwhelming new activity, and I can last a little longer than the first few seconds someone touches me.”

            Shion sat back on his legs. He was undressed only from the waist down, as he had been the night before. He was warmer from the blood he’d drank that morning, but still not warm enough.

            “Don’t be an asshole about it, I know you’re more experienced.”    

            “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” Nezumi said, leaning forward more, cupping Shion’s cheek, but Shion jerked away from him. “Hey, I’m sorry.”

            “If you’re not thrilled to have sex, why should we bother?” Shion snapped.

            “Shion, look at me, I didn’t mean it like that. Sex is different with you. Everything is different with you. I thought you knew that.”

            Shion glanced at Nezumi. He was already exhausted, but he couldn’t tell Nezumi that, or Nezumi would worry about him, and Shion didn’t need him to be worried again, didn’t need to start another fight – even though that was what he was doing now, he supposed.

            Even though he’d had a pint of blood that morning, Shion hadn’t eaten for weeks beforehand. He wanted to explain this to Nezumi. To tell him he was cranky only out of hunger, but he couldn’t tell Nezumi any of that, and that only made him feel worse.

            “Do you think I care that you’ve never had sex? I don’t, Shion. It doesn’t matter to me.”

            Shion rubbed his eyes. His contacts itched. He was starting to think he’d gotten immune to his eye drops. “I know it doesn’t matter.”

            Nezumi had shifted, was on his knees now and crawled in front of Shion. “Then can I kiss you, or will that make you more mad?”

            “I’m not mad at you,” Shion said tightly, still rubbing his eyes until Nezumi was pulling his hand down by his wrist.

            “Stop rubbing, your eyes are red.”

            Shion knew, of course, that Nezumi meant the whites of his eyes were red. He had no idea his actual eyes were red.

            “They itch.”

            “Because you slept in your contacts last night, you shouldn’t have put in another pair when you got up. Your eyes need a break.”

            “What do you know? You don’t wear contacts.”

            “Shion, stop snapping at me,” Nezumi said quietly, and Shion stopped trying to free his wrist from Nezumi’s hand.       

            He looked at Nezumi, who watched him back silently.

            “I don’t mean to take anything out on you. I’m just tired, but that’s not an excuse. I don’t know why you’re putting up with it.”

            Nezumi watched him another moment, then let go of Shion’s wrist. “If you’re tired, we should go to bed.”

            Shion didn’t argue. He was aware he’d ruined the mood, and he doubted Nezumi would allow argument anyway.

            Shion slid off the bed, got dressed, went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, use more eye drops, and check his foundation before leaving. He settled into bed while Nezumi used the bathroom, and then Nezumi was sliding onto the mattress beside him, slipping under the blankets. He wore only his boxers again, and his body was warm.

            “You’ll get hot,” Shion told him. He thought about apologizing again. He thought about thanking Nezumi for being patient with him. For not leaving him, even though any reasonable person would have done so a long time before.

            “You could use my body heat. Right?” Nezumi asked, slipping one of his legs between Shion’s.

            Shion closed his eyes before Nezumi could really look at him. He didn’t need the man to know he was still wearing his contacts.

            He felt Nezumi’s head slide onto his pillow, felt Nezumi’s breath on his lips a second before Nezumi kissed him. It was a quick kiss, and Nezumi was gone again before Shion had time to fully register that he was being kissed. Nezumi stayed close, and his hair tickled Shion’s forehead.

            “You’re breathing on me,” Shion told him, feeling Nezumi’s exhales on his cheeks.

            “Is that a problem?”

            “I guess not. You do have your own pillow though.”

            “I don’t want it.”

            “I know it’s hot, you don’t have to make yourself uncomfortable for me.”

            “I’m not uncomfortable,” Nezumi replied. “Are you?”

            Shion opened his eyes in slits. Saw that Nezumi’s own eyes were closed, so he opened his eyes wider, looked at the man properly. “I’ve never been more comfortable,” he whispered, and he could see when Nezumi’s lips turned up, a small smile, barely there.

            “Good night, professor.”

            “Good night, Nezumi.”

            Shion closed his eyes again. They still itched, but it was worth it. He would give up every comfort, to be loved by this man.

*


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a tiny chapter today, short and sweet... :)

The second morning Nezumi woke up in Shion’s bed was the twenty-first anniversary of the Great Slaughter.

            Nezumi did not realize this right when he woke. He had not been keeping track of the days. He did not care about anniversaries. They meant nothing but that time had passed, and of course it had – time always passed.

            Nezumi woke alone, which annoyed him. He pushed himself up on Shion’s bed until he was sitting, looked around Shion’s tiny apartment to see Shion in the kitchen, flipping something on a stove. The apartment smelled of syrup.

            “Professor,” Nezumi called, slumping back down onto the bed and closing his eyes.

            “Finally, you’re up,” Shion said, and then the bed shook underneath Nezumi, and Nezumi opened his eyes, found Shion straddling him, looking down at him happily.

            Nezumi took quick stock of the man. Healthy again, but then, Shion had told him so. He’d said he would be getting better for a while. Nezumi had no idea how long “a while” was, but didn’t ask. He didn’t want to talk about Shion’s secret, for once.

            “You’ve been asleep forever,” Shion said, sitting on Nezumi’s waist, which wasn’t a great idea, as Nezumi was only wearing boxers, and was half hard from a dream he’d had that involved Shion not wearing the ridiculous amount of layers he was currently. “Oh, what’s this?” Shion asked, grinding over Nezumi, who groaned unintentionally.

            “Stop dry humping me, pervert,” Nezumi said, gripping Shion’s waist to stop his movements.

            Shion did not yield to Nezumi’s grip, and kept grinding over him even as he carried on his conversation, sounding cheerful and energized. “I got up early and got pancake ingredients. I was hungry and didn’t want to wake you, so I ate already, but I made some for you. Are you hungry?”

            Nezumi could hardly keep track of what Shion was saying. “Will you shut up?” Nezumi asked, giving up on trying to make Shion stop his grinding and letting go of Shion’s waist in order to clench the bedsheets.

            “Want to have sex?” Shion asked back, still moving back and forth over him. “You look like you want to have sex. Feels like it too.”

            “Stop talking and take your clothes off,” Nezumi said, and Shion hopped right off of him.

            Nezumi thought back to the day before as Shion pulled off his sweatpants. Shion had been more energized in the morning than he had been at night. That made marginal sense – he needed sleep to recover – but it didn’t explain why the first time Nezumi had woken up the morning before, Shion had been sick, and the second time he’d woken a few hours later, Shion had been healthy.

            “What are you looking at me like that for, why aren’t you stripping?” Shion asked, climbing back on the bed with the condom and lube they had yet to use.

            Shion didn’t seem to have any desire to wait for an answer and pulled down Nezumi’s boxers. Nezumi moved his legs to help the professor along. He didn’t want to think about Shion’s secret. He didn’t want to wonder about it. He just wanted to have sex with the man, like they were normal, like there were no secrets at all.

            Shion laid on the bed beside Nezumi, handed Nezumi the lube and condom. “You’re in charge, since you’re Mr. Experience,” he said, smiling his stupid grin.

            Nezumi stared at it.

            “Be easy on me, I’m just a virgin, remember? And I don’t want it to hurt. Is it going to hurt? You can’t take any shortcuts, you’ll have to properly prepare me and be generous with the lube, I’m not interested in this hurting one bit. Actually, I think you should probably give me another blow job first, to relax me. Although I didn’t finish yours last night, oh, shit, I forgot, let me do that,” Shion said, bouncing right back up, and Nezumi sat up as Shion ducked down.

            “Hey, wait a second, professor,” Nezumi said, pulling Shion up by his hair, gently so as not to hurt him.

            Shion looked up at him. He didn’t look like he could ever be hurt. He looked ceaselessly happy, healthy, perfect.

            “What’s wrong?” he asked.

            Nezumi let his fingers drift from Shion’s hair. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. He didn’t want to tell Shion how freaked out he was. He didn’t want to talk about how Shion scared the shit out of him. He wanted to act normally, he wanted to just accept that Shion could be so tired one night, so energized the next morning, he wanted to pretend that seeing Shion healthy didn’t scare him just as much as seeing the man on his deathbed.

            Shion leaned forward, and Nezumi leaned back.

            “Oh,” Shion said.

            “What?”

            “I forgot. I can’t believe I forgot. I’m so sorry, Nezumi.”

            “What? What are you talking about?” Nezumi demanded.

            Shion tilted his head. “It’s June thirteenth. The twenty-first anniversary,” he said, after several seconds. “That’s why you’re looking at me like that, right? Like….”

            It was then, that Nezumi realized today was the anniversary of the Great Slaughter. He tried to ignore this fact. “Like what?”

            Shion touched Nezumi’s cheek lightly. “Like you’re lost.”

            Nezumi swallowed. Shook his head. “I’m not – I’m fine. I don’t care about that. It’s another year, that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t mean anything to me. Let’s have sex, give me that blow job you’ve been promising, go on.”

            Shion smiled gently at him. “Tomorrow,” he said.

            “Shion – ”

            “Today is a day to remember. Even if you don’t like anniversaries, even if you don’t care about them, I do. I want to remember your family today, and we’re not going to have sex for the first time like this. Come on, get dressed, I’ll make you some tea to have with your pancakes.”

            “Hey, professor, wait – ” Nezumi grabbed Shion’s wrist as Shion slipped halfway off the bed. The bones beneath his skin felt fragile, thin. Nezumi loosened his grip. Made himself admit the truth when Shion looked at him. “I don’t want to remember, Shion. I want to forget.”

            Shion didn’t look at him with pity, and Nezumi was so relieved for this. Shion looked at him seriously, as if he was thinking deeply, and then he nodded.

            “Okay, Nezumi.”

            He crawled back on the bed. Pushed Nezumi down onto his back again. “Close your eyes,” Shion whispered, so Nezumi did, felt Shion’s lips on his closed eyelids a moment later – left then right, and then Shion kissed the corners of his lips, tilted Nezumi’s head up to kiss along his throat, lips lingering at the pulse of Nezumi’s jugular.

            Nezumi took a deep breath. Let it out slowly as Shion’s lips moved again, the man kissing down his chest, lower, lower, stopping, picking up one of Nezumi’s hands and kissing his fingertips, his knuckles, his palms, his wrists, up along his veins to the inside of his elbow, up further, then gone again so Shion could kiss the insides of his knees, along his thighs.

            Nezumi hated that Shion was taking his time. He wanted to open his eyes and grab the man and push him down flat onto his stomach and hold him there and fuck him. Nezumi did not want to feel small parts of his body light up, parts that didn’t matter, parts that had nothing to do with sex as Nezumi had known it, parts no one had ever touched – along the bones of his hips, the tops of his shoulders, the creases of his palms. Shion’s skin was cold, every point of contact like a kiss of ice, and soon Nezumi was shivering. His heart felt too fast, too loud. This didn’t feel like sex, like anything Nezumi had ever known. Nezumi’s eyes burned, when Shion kissed the thin skin behind his ears. He didn’t want to be handled like this, tenderly, slowly, carefully. He wanted Shion to be rough with him. He wanted Shion to hurt him – anything but this, anything but kisses so soft Nezumi couldn’t be sure they were kisses at all. He felt wiry, lit up, like Shion’s lips were conducting a current through him, injecting him with electricity, turning his pulse to lightning, arousing thunder out each beat of his heart.

            Nezumi opened his eyes when Shion was kissing his jawline. Reached up, held Shion’s face between his hands, forced the man to look at him.

            “Nezumi,” Shion breathed. His fingers fell to Nezumi’s face, beneath his eyes, and when he took his fingers away, Nezumi saw that the tips of them were wet.

            Nezumi hadn’t realized he’d been crying. He didn’t want to realize this.

            “I don’t need to be taken care of. I don’t want you to do that,” Nezumi told the man. He tried to speak sternly. He tried to make Shion understand that these careful kisses were breaking him.

            Shion looked at him for a solid moment before he replied. “Just because you’re not used to it, doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.”

            Nezumi could think of nothing to say to this. Shion’s fingers fell over his eyelids, closed them again.

            Nezumi let Shion continue to kiss him. Light his skin up with moments of touch that branded him, and Nezumi wondered what would happen if he opened his eyes and looked down at himself, if he would see stars on his body from everywhere Shion had kissed, if Shion had turned his body into a constellation, into a galaxy, into something he would never understand, something that would never feel like his own again.

            Nezumi wrapped his fingers in the bedsheets. He didn’t know what to do with Shion’s attentiveness, his gentleness. He’d never had it before, not like this, and his chest felt tight, and he tried to relax.

            They didn’t have sex until an hour later. When Shion had finished kissing Nezumi, Nezumi felt wrung out, loose, exhausted from simply being touched. When Shion had finally given Nezumi a blow job, he’d come almost instantly, almost the moment Shion’s lips were around him, and they’d had to take a break, eat pancakes so Nezumi could be ready to go again, could feel anything but completely worn.

            And when they’d had sex, Nezumi had thought about the way Shion had touched him, kissed him, carefully and slowly and gently, and this was the way Nezumi kissed Shion back. This was the way Nezumi touched Shion back, this was the way Nezumi had fingered Shion, not in a rush the way he’d always treated sex, not like a task, not like an instinct but a deliberate decision, every touch a choice. This was the way Nezumi had entered the man, watching Shion’s face, kissing Shion’s knees and his fingers and his knuckles and his palms the way Shion had kissed his own. This was the way Nezumi had rocked into Shion, who laid on his back now, his eyelids fluttering, his sweaters risen up to reveal the flat of his stomach, his breaths faint and fast.

            This was not sex as Nezumi had ever known it. It was something different. Shion was something different, fingers loose in Nezumi’s hair, lips forming his stupid smile when Nezumi asked him for the tenth time if he was okay – _You really can stop asking me, I’ve been a lot more than okay for a while now._

            Shion was everything different, breaking Nezumi’s name into too many syllables, gasping at the smallest touch, uttering trails of soft sound that caved Nezumi’s heart into itself, that broke him apart.

            Shion was nothing Nezumi had ever been allowed to experience before, still touching Nezumi afterward, like they weren’t finished yet, like they hadn’t done anything yet, like he wasn’t done with Nezumi just because it was over, like he wasn’t in bed with Nezumi just for sex, the animal act of it – but Nezumi knew that.

            He knew it was different with Shion. He knew everything was different with Shion. He just wasn’t used to the idea of it yet. Being wanted like this. A selfish want and a selfless want all at once. Nezumi didn’t know what to do with any of it.

            “If I told you I was so in love with you and have been for longer than I care to admit right now, that would be cliché and I know you would hate it, so I’ll tell you a little later,” Shion told Nezumi softly, when they laid beside each other breathing, Shion’s fingers trailing over Nezumi’s face that way he did, like he was cataloguing Nezumi, making sure every part of him was still there.

            Nezumi closed his eyes. Concentrated on where Shion touched – lips, nose, eyelashes, cheek, hairline.

            “Don’t keep me waiting too long, professor,” Nezumi whispered back.

            Even though Nezumi’s eyes were closed, he could see Shion’s stupid grin, wide and ridiculous. And maybe – could it be possible? – there solely because of him.

*


	11. Chapter 11

Shion did not have nightmares about Nezumi finding out the truth. He didn’t need nightmares. He thought about it constantly when he was awake, the different ways it could happen.

            Nezumi began sleeping over nightly. He took showers in Shion’s bathroom, and Shion imagined that one day, he’d run out of conditioner – Nezumi went through bottles quickly, with that long hair Shion constantly knotted with his own fingers – and search for another bottle.

           Shion was not stupid. He hid his vamp-masking items – boxes of hair dye, a year supply of colored contacts, tubes of foundation, both _Warm Silk_ that he’d started using again after drinking his mother and Safu’s blood had returned his skin to its usual color, and unopened tubes of _Ghost Kiss_ that he still had left over – behind bottles of shampoo and mouthwash and bars of soap and Clorox wipes and toilet cleaner and toothpaste tubes in his cabinet.

           But in Shion’s imagination, Nezumi would rifle through all of this, scatter it all on Shion’s bathmat by his bare feet as he searched, cursing, for conditioner. In Shion’s imagination, Nezumi would find the items for Shion’s human disguise. Would think of his own vamp disguise from decades ago – white wig, crushed berries for a scar – and understand that Shion, too, had masks for his own survival.

           Shion preferred this scenario over some of the others. For example, he imagined alternatively that his dry eyes from sleeping in contacts would make Nezumi suspicious. That one night, catching Shion rubbing his eyes again, Nezumi would insist Shion take out his contacts, and Shion would insist that he preferred not to. Nezumi would wait for Shion to rub his eyes one more time before pinning Shion flat to the bed. Would pry Shion’s eyelids open and stick his fingers in Shion’s eyes and pluck out the dry contacts himself, his fingernails kept so short Shion would hardly feel the contact at all. Nezumi would look at his fingertips first, where the dark brown contacts would sit, before looking down at Shion and seeing the truth staring up at him.

           Shion imagined, as well, that Nezumi would have a sudden craving for oatmeal despite the fact that he hated oatmeal. Would search Shion’s cabinets and find cans of oatmeal behind everything else – most food items in Shion’s apartment were now the foods Nezumi liked to eat. Nezumi would ignore these foods he liked to eat, that he’d himself thrown in the cart when Shion took him grocery shopping, and instead pluck out a can of oatmeal and be surprised by its weight until he opened the can and found inside not oatmeal at all. Shion imagined Nezumi would stick his hand in and carefully lift out the beaker full of viscous red liquid. Would peel off the plastic wrap and lift the beaker to his face and sniff the liquid to immediately recognize the smell of what ran through his own veins.

           On the Sunday in late June that marked exactly two weeks since Shion first had sex with Nezumi, Shion no longer had to imagine this last possibility. He drank the last of his blood that very morning.

            Shion could have done better than drinking six pints in two weeks. He had been foolish with the blood Safu and his mother had collected for him, he had not rationed it smartly, he could have made it last half a year by drinking only as much a day as he needed to keep from starving to death.

            But Shion wanted energy. He wanted to feel alive. He wanted to be able to have sex with Nezumi multiple times a day. He wanted to be able to amaze Nezumi, with how healthy he was. He wanted to be able to stop wearing two sweaters when they had sex, to be completely naked, to not be shivering. He wanted stamina, he wanted to keep up with Nezumi, he wanted more than he’d ever let himself want in his life, and so he drank more than enough to keep him alive. He didn’t just want to be kept alive. He wanted everything else, too.

           Shion knew, while drinking the last of his blood, that today would be the last day he could count on having a good amount of energy. Nezumi was asleep still, as Shion washed the last empty beaker, went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth and rinsed with mouthwash and checked that his eyes were brown, his roots weren’t showing, his scar was covered.

           He returned to bed, then. Slipped beneath the blanket beside Nezumi.

           Nezumi stirred immediately. Arms curling toward Shion, fingers grasping loosely at Shion’s clothes, legs tangling in Shion’s own legs.

           Nezumi slid his head from his pillow to Shion’s without opening his eyes. Titled his head forward, nose nudging Shion’s before their lips made contact.

           Shion let himself be kissed. Was eager to do much more than kiss, but Nezumi was inching back too quickly.

           Nezumi’s silver eyes were always soft in the morning, foggy and muddled, taking time to focus on Shion’s face. “Why do you always get up and brush your teeth?” Nezumi murmured.

           “I like to be minty when you kiss me good morning,” Shion replied.

           Nezumi closed his eyes again. Frowned in a sleepy way that almost made Shion laugh. “I’m not minty,” he mumbled. He sounded disgruntled, still half-asleep.

            “I don’t mind. Come back and kiss me again, I’ll prove it to you.”

            Nezumi made a muffled sound, tilted his lips into the pillow. His bangs fell over his closed eyes, so Shion reached out, tucked them behind his ear.

            “You find out what role you got in _Hamlet_ today, right? Check your phone, maybe your manager texted you.”

            Nezumi spoke into the pillow so Shion could understand none of his sleepy garble.

            “What was that?” Shion asked, feeling Nezumi’s fingers slip beneath his sweater lazily, wander up only far enough to rest on Shion’s hip, then still again.

            Nezumi freed his lips from the pillow after a minute, but kept his eyes closed. “Manager won’t be up this early.”

            “It’s almost eight.”

            “Early.”

            “I can’t wait to know. I hope you’re Ophelia, your legs would look so good in a dress. Can I check?” Shion asked, at the same time turning, having difficulty sitting up with Nezumi’s arms around him, but still managing to touch the edges of Nezumi’s phone with his fingertips. He stretched farther, the edge of the nightstand digging lightly into the skin of his arm.

            “Come back,” Nezumi muttered, his arms fully wrapped around Shion’s torso, and Shion laughed, Nezumi’s light touch on his ribs tickling him, making him jerk his arm involuntarily so that the side of it scraped against the corner of his nightstand – hard.

            “Ah,” Shion gasped, pulling his arm towards him, and Nezumi loosened his arms, sat up beside Shion.

            Nezumi pushed his bangs off his face with one hand, pulled Shion’s arm towards him with the other.

            “You’re bleeding,” he mumbled groggily, twisting Shion’s arm carefully so they could both see the broken skin on Shion’s forearm just an inch from his elbow, and the drop of blood that squeezed free of the torn skin.

            “Just a little,” Shion said, as Nezumi leaned toward the small cut.

            “Want me to kiss it to make it better?”

            “That would be the least you could do, seeing as I only cut myself because of your octopus arms,” Shion replied, catching just a hint of Nezumi’s small smile before he pressed it against Shion’s arm.

            Shion had imagined confessing to Nezumi that he was a vampire, convincing himself that Nezumi would understand that not all vamps were like those he had known. Shion had imagined Nezumi waking in the middle of the night, sudden understanding hitting him – maybe he’d dreamed of Shion with red eyes and white hair and a scar, maybe he’d had one of his nightmares of the Great Slaughter that Shion had shaken him awake from before, maybe one of the vamps he’d seen killing his family had looked just like Shion.

            Shion had imagined Nezumi catching him spitting food into a napkin. Shion had imagined Nezumi baking beside him in Karan’s kitchen, witnessing when Shion wasn’t burned by a scorching hot pan despite forgetting to put on oven mitts. Shion had imagined Vamp Hunters finally tracking down each client of Discreet Meat despite the anonymity, Shion had imagined Nezumi seeing Shion on the nightly news, being arrested. Shion had imagined Nezumi reading about his execution in the newspaper, in the headline that Shion had imagined said _Tokyo Vamp Caught and Killed, City Rejoices._

            Shion thought he had imagined every possibility, in which Nezumi found out. But he had not imagined Nezumi kissing a scratch on his arm to heal him in the early morning, he had not imagined forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t human with harmless human blood, he had not imagined the poison from his own veins on Nezumi’s lips, he had not imagined that just the smallest drop of this poison would kill Nezumi, and Nezumi would never find out at all, because he’d be dead.

            Shion had not imagined this scenario in the weeks he’d been consumed with imagining Nezumi finding out, but he imagined it now, as Nezumi kissed his cut, and he jerked his arm free from Nezumi’s lips, jumped on Nezumi, pinned him to the bed and rubbed his sweater sleeve hard over Nezumi’s lips to free them of his poison.

            “What the hell?” Nezumi asked, once his lips were free. His eyes were wide, and Shion realized only after he had slammed Nezumi to the bed that he’d used all of his strength in his desperation to get the poison off Nezumi’s lips – he’d used all of his strength to overpower Nezumi in less than a second, strength that wasn’t human, strength that could never be mistaken for human.

            Shion stared at Nezumi’s lips. Wiped them with his thumb, just to be sure there was no poison left on them, and Nezumi grabbed Shion’s wrist, shoved his hand away.

            “What the fuck are you doing? Let go of me,” Nezumi demanded, but despite his words his eyes were wide.

            Frightened. He was frightened, and for a moment, Shion wondered if he’d broken the bones of Nezumi’s wrists – it would have been so easy, for Shion to have snapped them in half – in his haste to pin Nezumi down to the bed, to wipe the poison off his lips.

            “Are you okay?” Shion asked, getting off of Nezumi, who rubbed one of his wrists, scooched back on the bed until he was against the headboard, a pillow caught between it and his back.

            “How did you do that?” Nezumi demanded.

            Shion swallowed. “Do what?”

            “You’re seriously going to deny it?”

             “I’m not denying anything,” Shion said, fighting to keep his voice from turning defensive, from giving him away, from being anything but calm and a little curious, as if he had no idea what Nezumi could be referring to, as if he, too, had no idea he was anything but human.

            Nezumi stopped rubbing his wrist, his curled fingers stilling. He stared at Shion wordlessly.

            Shion looked away from Nezumi’s fearful expression. Looked only at Nezumi’s wrist, nodded his chin at it. “Is your wrist okay? Does it hurt? It could be sprained.”

            “You think you sprained my wrist from holding me down to the bed?” Nezumi asked quietly, after a moment.

            Shion refused to look up from Nezumi’s fingers around his wrist, curled only loosely now. “I don’t know. Can I look at it?”

            After several seconds, Nezumi let go of his wrist. Held his arm out, slowly extended it.

            Shion looked up at Nezumi’s face then, saw the man watching him carefully, the fear gone and replaced by that silent examination he gave Shion too often – the focus Shion loved, the focus Shion hated.

            Shion inched closer to Nezumi on the bed. He wore his usual sweatpants and sweaters, but Nezumi was only in boxers the way he always slept, his legs pulled up to his chest, one arm wrapped around his legs, the other offered to Shion, who took it, saw that Nezumi’s pale skin was pink from his own grip.

            Shion touched Nezumi’s skin gingerly. Felt Nezumi’s bones beneath his skin. His wrist was a little swollen, but Shion didn’t think it was sprained. He was about to move Nezumi’s hand in small circles, ask the man if these movements hurt, but before he could Nezumi was tackling him, unraveling from his ball against the headboard and springing at Shion, pinning Shion down to the bed so that he was the one flat on his back now.

            Shion didn’t have time to react. Was pinned with bunched up blankets between his back and the mattress, and then Nezumi’s hand was against his throat, pushing down on his windpipe.

            “Nezumi!” Shion breathed.

            Nezumi’s face was blank, empty of any expression, any sign of what he was thinking. He did not look fearful anymore, wary or angry or upset. He looked impassive, detached, cold, and Shion felt his heartbeat thud quickly in his ears with his own panic.      

            Shion had his hands around Nezumi’s wrist, trying to pull Nezumi’s hand from his throat, but he wasn’t using his vamp strength. He had stifled it back down again, was keeping track of how strongly he pulled Nezumi’s hand to try to free himself, but then it got hard to keep track, then he could hardly breathe.

            His eyes were burning, blurring. He felt tears slide out the sides of them, along his face into his hairline. Nezumi applied more pressure to his throat. Shion couldn’t think of why. He couldn’t think at all.

            When Shion stopped thinking, he did not pass out. He tore Nezumi’s hand from his throat and threw Nezumi off of him with everything he had – and what he had was vampire poison running through his veins, what he had was the strength of a creature that was not human, what he had was the power of what most people considered a monster, and there was a reason for this.

            Like a monster, Shion could squeeze Nezumi’s wrist so tightly Nezumi’s bones cracked inside Shion’s palm, Nezumi’s grip fell away completely. Like a monster, Shion could throw Nezumi off of him so hard he flew back, his body tossed as easily as Shion had tossed an empty tube of _Warm Silk_ in the trash two nights before. Nezumi’s body slammed against the opposite wall – part of his body hitting the wall and the rest of it hitting the headboard with a solid _smack!_ and then all of Nezumi was crumpling onto the bed.

            Shion only vaguely registered any of this. Mostly, he was fighting for his own breath, clutching his own throat loosely now that Nezumi’s hand was gone, breathing deeply and closing his eyes and making himself even his inhales and exhales so he wouldn’t pass out from gasping. Oxygen flooded him, made him dizzy, made him lie flat on the bed despite his efforts to get up, made him stare up at the ceiling and wait for it to stop blurring at the edges, shifting this way and that, seeming to float away from him and collapse down on him all at once.

            When the ceiling stood still again, Shion pushed himself up. Saw Nezumi stirring as well, the heap of him unraveling from the bed until he was on his knees, his chest heaving, one arm pressed to his chest, the other over it, as if to save it from any more harm Shion might do to it.

            Shion didn’t ask, this time, if Nezumi’s wrist was okay. He knew it was not. Could hear the crack of its bones still, loud in his ears, almost as loud as Nezumi’s breaths.

            For a full minute, Nezumi just breathed and stared at Shion, and Shion watched him back, listening to his heartbeat flooding his ears, trying not to panic, trying to remain calm. He was aware that Nezumi would not feel the pain of his broken bones, that Nezumi’s shock would be shielding him from this pain, which would otherwise have been excruciating and agonizing. Shion tried to find comfort in this fact. Tried to stifle down his own nausea at what he had just done with this fact.

            “Are you still going to deny it?” Nezumi finally asked, voice loose and airy around his heavy breaths, and Shion understood that Nezumi had been pushing him, pushing him to finally reveal the truth with his hand around Shion’s throat.

            “You need to go to the hospital,” Shion told him, keeping his voice even. “Right now, the shock is masking your pain, but you could be seriously hurt.”

            “Give me some bullshit,” Nezumi breathed, not seeming to have been listening to Shion. “Tell me something to explain that. Tell me anything, Shion.” He sagged to the side, winced, a narrow of his eyes that was barely there, that maybe no one else might have noticed, but Shion noticed. He watched Nezumi as carefully as Nezumi always watched him.

            “Nezumi, your wrist – ”

            “Anything. I’ll believe anything,” Nezumi whispered. He was not angry. He was not vengeful.

            He was pleading, and Shion understood what he wasn’t saying.

            _Tell me anything but the truth._

            Nezumi’s eyes were wide. He looked almost like a child, and Shion could imagine him too easily on the night of the Great Slaughter. Shion could imagine that Nezumi had witnessed the massacre of everyone he’d loved with the same expression Nezumi gave Shion now.

            Horror. Fear. Disbelief. More than any of these – desperation. A desperate want for everything he was witnessing to stop. For anything but the truth, anything but what was happening in front of him. It had been twenty-one years since the Great Slaughter. Nezumi had just turned twenty-eight years old. But at that very moment, he could have been a little kid, wearing a white wig with berries smeared over his face, losing everything he’d ever known all at once.

            “At the very least, it’s a fracture,” Shion managed, trying to ignore Nezumi’s wide eyes, trying to ignore Nezumi’s fast breaths, trying to ignore the shake of Nezumi’s lips.

            “You can’t be,” Nezumi whispered, as if Shion had confessed, but he hadn’t, he hadn’t, he couldn’t get the words to his lips.

            Nezumi did not move from where he was half crumpled on his own knees against the headboard. He wore only his boxers because he’d only just woken. Hadn’t even brushed his teeth yet. Dark hair still mussed from sleep. Shion was certain, if he crawled closer to Nezumi, if he was allowed to look closely at the man, he would see that one side of Nezumi’s eyelashes were bent oddly from where they’d been smashed to the pillow.

            But Shion didn’t crawl closer to him. Nezumi was terrified enough. The left side of Nezumi’s nearly naked body was darkening in color, flooding with a deep blush that Shion knew would darken into a bruise. A visible mark, evidence of how Shion had thrown Nezumi against a wall with too much force for a human. Evidence Nezumi wouldn’t be able to deny. Evidence Shion wouldn’t be able to hide.

            “You shouldn’t take the subway, your arm could get jostled from the crowds. I can call an ambulance. I’m going to move, I’m going to get off the bed and get my phone from the nightstand. I’m just going to call an ambulance, that’s all,” Shion said slowly, a warning, so Nezumi would know he wasn’t coming closer, but when Shion shifted to slide off the bed, Nezumi flinched so abruptly he crushed his wrist to his own chest.

            The hiss of Nezumi’s breath was louder than his voice had been when he’d spoken. His exhale was hard and fast. His eyes were bright and still wide, wide, wide.

            Shion had frozen. Curled his fingers tight in the blanket underneath him. Pretended his heart hadn’t broken right in half at the look of Nezumi’s panic. Pretended he could still breathe.

            Shion fought to speak. His voice shook when it left him. “Okay, okay, it’s okay, Nezumi. You have to listen to me, okay? I’m still the same. You know who I am, you know me, you love me, and I love you, and this was an accident. I couldn’t breathe, you were choking me, and I just reacted, but – I would never hurt you, you have to know that, you have to understand that, I love you so much, Nezumi, I love you so so much.”

            Nezumi’s skin was pale, paler than its usual porcelain, paler than any foundation Shion had ever tried – and Shion had tried them all, every single one of them.

            Shion felt his eyes burn and refused to cry. “Please don’t be scared, Nezumi. Please don’t be scared of me.”

            Nezumi’s shoulders were curled into his body. He looked small, smaller than a grown man. Smaller than someone strong, someone who’d promised to fight the first vamp he came in contact with, who’d promised to torture this vamp, who’d promised to kill it.

            Nezumi didn’t look capable of killing. In this moment, he didn’t look capable of hurting anything at all, but Shion felt no relief.

             “I know I’m wrong, professor,” Nezumi said, very softly, saying _professor_ the way he always did, but never before had the nickname destroyed Shion the way it did at that moment. “Just tell me I’m wrong, I can always count on you for that, right? Just tell me I’m wrong.”

            _Wrong about what?_ Shion thought, but he couldn’t get the words out. He couldn’t pretend not to know. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t too late. He couldn’t pretend he was human anymore, and he couldn’t let Nezumi pretend either.

            “You’re not wrong,” Shion finally whispered.

            A tear fell from one of Nezumi’s wide eyes, the corner, along the bridge of his nose, the same exact path Shion’s lips had taken just the night before, while Nezumi had laughed breathily into his skin – _Stop that, professor, I’m trying to sleep!_

            “I’m just going to get my phone, I won’t come near you,” Shion told him carefully, watching the tear. It hesitated on Nezumi’s upper lip, then slid over the curve of it, slipped into the gap between Nezumi’s lips where Shion’s poison would have slipped if Shion had not tackled Nezumi, had not used the force he only had because he was not human at all.

            Shion slid off the bed, backward, away from Nezumi, but also away from the nightstand. Nezumi didn’t move this time. Shion stood carefully when he was off the bed. Walked backward from it in a wide arch, having to circle closer again to get to the nightstand, and Nezumi watched him the entire time with his wide, wet eyes.

            The same eyes that had taken in a massacre. The same eyes that had witnessed monsters sucking blood straight from the jugular, but they hadn’t been monsters.

            They’d just been vamps. And that wasn’t the same, Shion had to convince Nezumi it wasn’t the same, had to convince Nezumi _he_ wasn’t the same, but instead, he reached for his phone.

            Shion’s fingers were shaking. He unlocked it. Went to the dial screen, typed in slowly for the first time in his life 1-1-9.

            Shion spoke to the police quickly, giving no more details than was necessary – his address, that a man possibly had a broken wrist, that an ambulance was needed as soon as possible. He hung up after the woman on the phone confirmed she’d sent an ambulance. He tucked his phone in his pocket. He looked at Nezumi, who watched him still.

            “I have to leave. They’ll send a police car along with the ambulance, it’s just procedure, and I have to avoid police, even with my disguise,” Shion said quietly. He pretended Nezumi would not report him. He pretended Nezumi still trusted him. He pretended Nezumi might still love him.

            Nezumi was silent. Shion walked numbly to the door. He could no longer feel his heartbeat, wonder if it had ceased completely, wondered how long it would be before he dropped dead.

            He slipped his shoes on by the door. Had his hand on the handle when Nezumi’s voice stopped him.

            “I believed all of it.” Nezumi spoke so quietly Shion could barely hear him, despite the absence of his own heartbeat, despite the shallowness of his own breaths.

            Shion turned, held his breath to listen. Another tear fell from the corner of Nezumi’s other eye, trickled down his cheek quicker than the first had.

            “I believed everything. Not just that you were human. I believed that you loved me. I believed that my life had changed. I believed that I was happy, really happy. Stupid happy.”

            Shion pressed his hand to his lips, hard, to keep himself from gasping, from drowning out what was barely there of Nezumi’s voice.

            “I believed that you really wanted to have a life with me. You should have just killed me, instead of making me believe all that shit.”

            The sound of sirens cut off any response Shion could have given Nezumi. Shion didn’t know how the ambulance could have arrived so quickly. Maybe his perception of time was off completely. Maybe, without a heartbeat, without an internal metronome, Shion couldn’t tell time at all. It had ceased to exist for him, and maybe that was why it felt like forever, that Nezumi looked at him with an expression that had gone blank, maybe that was why it felt like not even a second had passed, when the sirens were nearly deafening, and Shion knew he had to get out.

            There was no time to tell Nezumi he was right to believe everything. There was no time to tell Nezumi that Shion wanted nothing more than a life with him, that this was the very reason he’d lied, this was the reason he’d pretended to be human, this was the reason for everything.

            Shion said nothing. He opened the apartment door, and he slipped out of it, closed it lightly and left Nezumi, like everyone else in Nezumi’s life had before – terrified and injured and alone.

*

Nezumi had always thought it would be the easiest thing he could ever do, to kill a vamp when he came across one again.

            He had always thought he wouldn’t have to think twice about it.

            He had always thought it was what he wanted, what he was desperate for.

            He had always thought it would, if not make everything better, then at least make something right, at least rectify one of the lives that’d been taken from him, of the countless he’d lost.

            Nezumi had always thought, of everything that had been hard in his life, of everything he’d had to struggle through to survive, of everything unjust and inhumane and punishing and painful and cruel and unfair that he’d had to bear, to endure, to suffer, to outlive, this one thing would be simple. This one thing would be right. This one thing would give him peace.

*

Shion had returned to his apartment by late Sunday night when there was a knock on the door. He guessed Nezumi would have been discharged from the hospital by now, but even so, Shion knew it would not be Nezumi at the door. He knew the person at his door would be Safu.

            He did not know she would have a gun.        

            “What is that?” Shion asked, even though he knew what it was – of course he did.

            Safu held it out in the open, but in her other hand was a brown paper bag, which she was crumpling in her fist. “You have to be cautious. If you refuse to stay at my place, or better yet, go to some hotel for a few days, you should at the very least have something to defend yourself.”

            “I’m not going to shoot him, Safu, are you insane?” Shion shouted.

            Safu closed the door behind her. Shion pressed himself to the wall beside his bed where he stood. He’d been trying to change his bedsheets, but he couldn’t get the fitted sheet on right. He kept readjusting it, but the long side of the sheet always seemed to be on the short side of the bed. He’d ripped it off and pivoted it four times. He couldn’t imagine how he could still be getting it wrong. At some point, it had to fit. At some point, there were no other options for how he could position the thing.     

            “It’s not for him, it’s for the Vamp Hunter Nezumi’s going to call. Although you might have to use it on Nezumi, and you should prepare yourself for that. He might not send a Vamp Hunter, we both know Nezumi wanted to torture any vamp he met himself. It was likely only shock that stopped him from trying to do anything to you earlier today.”

            “Get that out of here. I’m not going to shoot anyone,” Shion said, his voice hard.

            “Shion, you have to be realistic.”                   

            “He was terrified. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t vengeful. He was scared of me,” Shion said tightly. “Why would I need a gun anyway? I hurt him just fine without it.”

            Safu did not reply as she walked around the other side of the bed. She opened Shion’s nightstand and placed the gun inside the drawer. She said nothing of the contents of the drawer – which was full of condoms, a bottle of lube, a pair of handcuffs, a vibrating cock ring – the last item having been Nezumi’s twenty-eighth birthday present.

            Safu closed the drawer. Reached over to the middle of the bed, where the fitted sheet lay, bunched up.

            “Get the other side,” Safu said, pulling one side toward her, but Shion didn’t even look at the sheet. He was done with it. He wanted nothing to do with it. The useless sheet was clearly faulty, and Shion had been planning on tossing it into the garbage before Safu walked in the door with a gun.

            “Where did you even get it?” Shion demanded.

            “A gun shop.”

            “What gun shop? Where did you get a license?”

            “You don’t need them anymore. Since the Discreet Meat article from months ago, a law passed that Tokyo gun shops are allowed to sell guns to people without licenses. Most of the listed cities where Discreet Meat customers had their blood delivered enacted similar laws. It was in the news. Does any of this matter?”

            Shion pointed at the nightstand while Safu struggled on her own with the bedsheet. “Get that out, Safu. I’m telling you to get it out of here, I don’t want it.”

            “If you don’t want to use it, don’t. It’s here if you need it.”

            “I’m not going to kill anyone! You’re just as bad as Nezumi! You look at me, and you see someone capable of murder, just because I’m a vamp – ”

            Safu flung the bedsheet back onto the bed. “I have never seen a murderer in you! I have never looked at you and seen anyone but my best friend! Don’t you dare say that about me! I am nothing like Nezumi, I would never treat you like who you are depends on what you eat, I would never judge your character on your hair color or your eye color or the scar on your skin! I know I never made you as happy as he did, I know you don’t care about what I think or what I say, I know you only care about Nezumi now, not even your own life, but don’t you dare act as if I have ever thought of you as less than me or any other human for what you are! I got you a gun to protect you! I do everything to protect you, because I love you, because you’re my best friend, because you’re my family, because I’m so scared that you’re going to die, and you have the nerve to tell me I think of you as just a dangerous vamp?”

            Shion felt nothing but hot shame as Safu shouted, and then she was stalking out of the apartment, back through the door before Shion could get out a word.

            The door slammed hard. Shion waited for numbness to wash over him as it had that morning, after he’d left Nezumi. He waited to feel nothing, the comfort of that, but after looking at the fitted sheet in a lump on his bed for a few seconds, Shion fell to his knees on the floor.

            What he felt was not numbness. It was not heartbreak either. It was something else, something worse, a break of everything inside him – heart and bones and all of it, everything, and he could do nothing but try to keep breathing despite the violent sobs that pulled themselves fast and unforgiving from the deepest parts of his chest, from a chasm inside of him that he hadn’t known existed.

*


	12. Chapter 12

“Cut! Take a break! Five minutes, then everyone get back here! Nezumi, you come see me!”

            Nezumi jumped off the front of the stage, ignoring the pain that shot up his side, and walked to the middle of the front row where his manager sat.

            “What?”

            “What’s wrong with you?” Kage asked.

            Nezumi tried to shove his hands in his pockets, but only his left slid easily into his jeans. He had forgotten about the damn cast that nearly covered his fingers, stretched up his entire right forearm. “Nothing.”

            “I let you be Ophelia instead of Hamlet because you requested it, remember? You’re the one who turned down the lead role. So what’s the problem?”

            “Nothing,” Nezumi said again.

            “Why don’t you know your lines? During auditions you had the entire play memorized.”  

            “I know my lines.”

            “Then why aren’t you saying them?”

            Nezumi shrugged. The movement hurt. Half of his body was bruised. When the doctor had asked about the bruise, Nezumi had said nothing about being thrown like a sack of flour at a wall. When the doctor had asked about his crushed wrist, about the bones within it split into fractures that would take months in a hard and cumbersome cast to heal – if they ever did completely – Nezumi had not said anything.

            Nezumi waited for his manager to yell at him, but Kage only looked at Nezumi carefully. Nezumi resisted the reflex to tuck his bangs behind his ears. He was glad that half his face was hidden.

            “Nezumi, you’ve worked for me for over ten years. Believe it or not, despite your stubborn disrespect for me, I do care about you. You were a kid when I plucked you off the street, and I’ve watched you grow into a man, into an extremely talented actor. If something is wrong, you can tell me that. You don’t have to tell me what, you don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, but if you tell me something is going on in your life and you need to be cut a little slack, I’ll give it to you.”

            Nezumi clenched his jaw. Looked away from his manager, preferring the view of the empty seats around him. “Nothing is going on.”

            “So this is just carelessness? This is just you being difficult for the sake of getting on my nerves, Nezumi, that’s what you’re saying?” The words were skeptical.

            Nezumi looked back at his manager. Kept his reply light, toneless. “Guess so.”

            Kage stared hard at Nezumi. “It’s only human to need a break. If you need a break, just tell me, Nezumi, I will understand – ”

            “I don’t need a break. Can we get on with it?” Nezumi snapped. He didn’t wait for a reply. Turned from the manager. Walked back to the stage, climbed onto it using only one hand. The arm encased by his bulky white cast ached, but Nezumi didn’t like pain killers. He let it throb, a steady pulse, like a second heartbeat.

            The manager was shouting from behind him now. “Everyone, that’s your five minutes! Get back on stage, start where we left off, Laertes exit in scene three.”

            Nezumi waited in the center of the stage. Listened to his castmate – Gaku – address him.

            “What is’t, Ophelia, be hath said to you?”

            Nezumi looked out at the theater. At the seats, all empty but for his manager. It would be a few months before they started the new season’s play, but already, people wanted tickets. The seats would be filled. Just like they always were, every single one of them. Like nothing had changed.

            “Nezumi, either say your fucking line, or get out of my theater!” Kage yelled, from his seat.

            Nezumi looked at Gaku. He couldn’t remember his line. He had no idea what Gaku had said.

            Gaku worded something to him, silently with his lips, trying to feed him the line, but Nezumi didn’t try to understand.

            “Get out!” Kage screamed.

            Nezumi didn’t want to leave. He’d come to rehearsal to give himself somewhere to be. To give himself something to do. To be around other people. There were witnesses here.

            Nezumi walked slowly off the stage. Didn’t leave the theater, but went backstage, to the dressing rooms. Maybe he’d find Misaki. She still hadn’t figured out the gouged eye look, and even though they were done _Oedipus Rex_ , they’d probably put on the play again in a few years. She could perfect the look for then.

            “So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet.”

            Nezumi stopped in front of his dressing room. Shunsuke stood against the wall beside the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.

            “That was your line,” Shunsuke said. “Got the play memorized myself, you thought you were the only Shakespeare fan?”

            Nezumi stared at him. Here was someone. A witness. A distraction. An alibi. Nezumi didn’t know what he needed.

            He didn’t know if Shion was going to kill him. He didn’t know if he was going to kill Shion.

            He was supposed to. Vamps had killed his family. His dynasty deserved justice. Nezumi had watched everyone die, he’d been the only one to survive, who else could give them justice? Who else was left to get revenge?

            No one. Nezumi was it, the only one, alone. He couldn’t save them twenty-one years ago; it was the least he could do, to seek retribution now.

            Nezumi focused on Shunsuke. Tried to think of nothing else but this man who was undeniably human – unremarkable, uninteresting, harmless. “Want to get out of here?”

            Shunsuke laughed. “Do you?”

            Nezumi tapped his fingers against his cast, let the dull pain slip all the way up his arm to his shoulders.

            “You know, everyone who works here has nothing better to do than gossip about things that aren’t their business. Latest gossip is you’ve been hand holding some guy. It’s hard to picture, but I guess anyone can be the hand holding type with the right person.”

            Nezumi pushed his bangs off his forehead. It was too hot in the theater. Maybe the air conditioning was broken. “Do you want to fuck or not?”

            “I’m not what you want, Nezumi. We both know that.”

            “Why don’t you let me decide what I want?”

            Shunsuke uncrossed his arms, leaned forward from the wall. “Make-up Misaki is convinced you’re in love. Obviously, Misaki’s full of crap most of the time, but we’ve all noticed it. You’re happy. Or you were, but then today you show up here all beat up, forgetting your lines – ”

           “I don’t need your lecture, seeing as you’re just the goddamn lights guy, and I already heard enough from the manager, so you can just – ”

           “I don’t care that you can’t remember your lines,” Shunsuke interrupted quickly. “Well, I do care, only because you never forget your lines. Especially not with Shakespeare. I guess I’m worried. You don’t look yourself. You look…sad, maybe,” Shunsuke said, like he knew everything, and Nezumi wanted to beat the shit out of him.

            He thought about it. Looked at Shunsuke’s face and imagined breaking his nose. Hitting his eyes, shattering his jaw, snapping his cheekbone. Cracking his bones, the way Nezumi’s own had been cracked, except it wouldn’t be like that at all.

             Shunsuke sighed. “You know, I have no idea how you feel about me, if you even bother thinking about me at all, but I think you’re okay, Nezumi. Let’s be honest, we don’t know a lot about each other, and I’m fine with that. But I do know there’s something about you. There always has been. It’s the only reason the manager puts up with your crap – people come to this theater for you. As much as you’re an asshole a lot of times, you get up on stage and you give the audience something incredible every night. And for the last few weeks, it looked like maybe you were experiencing something incredible too. I just think it’d be really great, if you were happy like that all the time. I want that for you. You should want that for yourself.”

            “Are you done?” Nezumi asked him. He wouldn’t punch the man. He just wanted Shunsuke to stop talking, to stop looking at him, to leave him alone.

            “Yeah, I’m done,” Shunsuke said, after a moment, and then he pushed himself off the wall, stepped away from Nezumi.

            Nezumi turned to watch Shunsuke disappear down the hall. When the sound of his footsteps were gone, Nezumi could only faintly hear voices from the stage, his castmates rehearsing without him.

            It was a day after he’d learned what Shion was. Part of Nezumi was convinced he’d dreamed it, imagined it, that he would walk outside of the theater and there Shion would be, grinning his stupid grin, talking about nonsense, nothing but human.

            Part of Nezumi had to wonder – maybe the guy was just really strong. Could crush bones with his hands. Could toss people against walls, hard, like they were nothing but stones to him.

            But most of Nezumi was fully aware that there was nothing to wonder about. There were no secrets anymore. Shion was not just strong – he wasn’t human. Shion was a monster, and everything else was a lie, no matter how real it had seemed.

            No matter how incredible it had felt while it’d lasted.

*

Shion had been calling and texting Nezumi, had stood outside Nezumi’s apartment for hours knocking and speaking to the closed door, had gone to the theater only to be told by the man Shion knew to be Nezumi’s manager that he would report Shion for trespassing if Shion didn’t get lost.

            Shion had explained that he just wanted to see Nezumi, and the manager – Kage was his name, Shion remembered – had replied back, _Who do you think asked me to report you for trespassing?_

            Shion had left, but not gone far. He’d watched from the tourist shop across the theater, flicking through postcards on their little wire racks until Nezumi left the theater a half hour after Shion’s conversation with his manager. Nezumi’s arm had been in a large white cast. Shion had intended to run up to Nezumi when the man left the theater, but on seeing the cast, Shion stayed where he was. Stopped flicking through the postcards and watched Nezumi walk down the street until the man had disappeared down the steps to the subway.

            On Wednesday, two days after Shion had gone to the theater, three days after the truth had come out, Safu came into the kitchen of the bakery where Shion was trying to ice a cake. Customers still wanted Nezumi’s specialty cakes, but Shion couldn’t do what Nezumi had done. His roses were nothing like Nezumi’s.

            “This was slipped under my apartment door,” Safu said, as she walked through the swinging door.

            Shion didn’t look up from the cake. “I can’t get this right, I can’t do this like he did.”

            “It’s from Nezumi.”

            Shion looked up. Took the paper Safu held out. It had been folded only once in half. It was a soft paper, small, a paper torn out of a book, one of the blank pages that were at the end, after the entire story had already been told.

            On it, Nezumi had written –

            _Tell him to leave me alone. I won’t tell anyone, I won’t report him, just make him leave me alone. Please._

            Shion’s breath fell from his lips at the _Please._ There was no signature, but there didn’t need to be.

            “He said he won’t report you,” Safu said softly. “That’s the best we could hope for. Better than what we could have hoped for. This is amazing for Nezumi, to just leave you alone.”

            “I don’t want him to leave me alone.” Shion folded the note. Tucked it into his pocket even though he never wanted to read it again.

            “He could have wanted you dead, Shion. Vamps killed his family – ”

            “I know that, Safu. You think I don’t know that? I know what they did to him, but I wasn’t there, I never hurt him – ”

            “You broke his arm.”

            “He was choking me!” Shion squeezed the icing bag too hard, and a glob of pink icing poured out onto the counter. Shion let go of the icing bag. Stared at the mess he’d made.

            “Maybe you’re better off without each other,” Safu said, after a moment.

            “You don’t think that,” he said slowly, examining his friend’s wary expression. He didn’t want to fight with Safu again, but he’d thought that she understood. That she understood Nezumi was worth every risk. That she understood everything had changed since Nezumi. That she understood Shion had been waiting his entire life for this change.

            Safu broke Shion’s gaze, walked around the counter to grab a paper towel, set to wiping the glob of icing from beside Shion’s cake, looking down resolutely as if this task took all of her concentration. “From now on, you’ll just remind him of his past. Nezumi doesn’t want that. He’s never wanted that. Would you want that, to fall in love with someone you’ve spent your life hating?”

            “He’s never hated me. He’s hated the vamps who killed his family – ”

            Safu looked up at him, curling her fingers loosely around the icing-filled paper towel. “You’re not like Romeo and Juliet. There isn’t some age-old feud from a long-ago irrelevant time that’s made Nezumi wired to hate you for frivolous reasons that he can just cast off. He lived through a massacre where he lost everyone. He watched it with his own eyes, he climbed among piles of blood-depleted bodies that were lit on fire to search for his parents and his sister, he was burned by this fire, and when he found his family they were dead. His fear of vamps is not something that can go away. It’s rooted too deeply, it’s carved into him, he has third degree burns to prove it. You should let him go. You should leave him alone. Whatever else he feels for you, a part of him will always be scared. To love you is just confusing for him. To want you despite everything must feel like a betrayal to his dynasty, to everyone he lost, to himself as a child. How is that good for him? How is that good for you?”

            Shion narrowed his eyes, dug his nails into his own palms. He refused to agree with Safu, refused to accept her words as if they were the only logic, the only option. “For Nezumi to group me in with a gang of violent vamps from his past is to betray to me. It’s to betray himself as a man right now, a man that loves me, that is happy because of me. I am not his past, and he has never been someone to live in his past. I know I hurt him. I know I lied to him. I take responsibility for every wrong I’ve done to him, but I won’t take responsibility for what every vamp has ever done. I’m not every vamp.”   

            “I know that, Shion. But he’ll always see it that way.”

            “He’ll always see it that way if I leave him alone, if I stay away from him, if I disappear from his life. I have no intention of doing that,” Shion said back, shaking his head and picking up the icing bag again, concentrating on the top of his cake.

            The client wanted a bouquet of roses. It was an anniversary cake. Ten years. It seemed to Shion an impossible amount of time to get to love someone. An impossible amount of time to be loved back.

            “Shion. You’re lucky he isn’t telling authorities. Anyone else would have contacted Vamp Hunters.”

            “You wouldn’t,” Shion told the half a rose he’d managed. The petals were uneven. He used to be better at this, he was certain he was better at this before.

            “You’re my family. I love you.”

            “So does Nezumi.”     

            “Right now, I don’t think he does.”   

            Shion exhaled slowly so he wouldn’t ruin his rose, so he wouldn’t snap at Safu again. “Safu, I have a deadline for this, and you’re distracting me.”

            Safu left Shion’s side and began a batch of mini lemon angel cakes, but after ten minutes, she sighed and put down her whisk.

            “Minus breaking his arm, did you really think there was a better way for this to end?”

            “I don’t want it to end at all,” Shion replied, examining the finished cake, frowning at the end result.

            “He was never going to be forever, Shion. I thought you knew that.”

            Shion looked at his friend. He knew she just wanted him to be safe. He knew she just cared too much about him to risk losing him. He hated fighting with her, he hated disagreeing with her, but he couldn’t drop this. This wasn’t something frivolous. Nezumi wasn’t something that didn’t matter.

            “Nezumi wasn’t the only one who lost life as he knew it in the Great Slaughter. I lost my life too. I lost the right to live as myself. I lost the right to be normal, and to go to school, and to have a childhood. And you gave me so much back of what I lost with your friendship, and I will always be grateful for that. You showed me that I didn’t have to sacrifice my happiness because of what I am, and that’s why I can’t sacrifice Nezumi either. I can’t give up on him. I refuse to give up my right to be in love, and to be loved back, and it’s your fault, Safu, for making me so stubborn, for making me think I have a right to everything humans have. I won’t apologize for it, and I won’t justify myself to you. I would never have thought I’d have to.”

            Safu looked down at the cake, at Shion’s single, pathetic, half-iced rose. “We were safer before him. I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she said quietly, her voice thick.

            “He won’t hurt me.”

            Safu shook her head roughly, as if to shake the idea away. “I want to believe you, I really do.”

            They resumed baking in silence, Shion finishing with his icing, boxing the cake, and taking it up to the front for the customer, hoping she wouldn’t open the box in front of him to check on the finished product.

            Before Nezumi, Shion would have been satisfied with it, might have even been proud. But now it felt so obvious that something was missing, and what he could have lived with before was no longer good enough.

*

On Thursday, Nezumi was cut from his role in _Hamlet_.

            Kage refused to fire him, refused to let him quit, told him he would be Ophelia’s understudy, and in the meantime, he was to work in the stage crew. Nezumi spent the day learning the ropes of stage crew. He was on running crew, which always needed more hands. His role now was to dress in dark clothing, to move props behind the scenes, to dash onto the stage every once in a while but try his best not to be seen by the audience.

            It was the opposite of what Nezumi was used to, of having a spotlight dedicated to himself and himself only. Nezumi didn’t mind the change. The audiences would mind, Nezumi knew that, and he knew his manager knew that, but when another member of the cast brought up this fact, Kage told her to shut up and get back in her position.

            After his first day of learning running crew, Nezumi returned home exhausted. Running crew required heavy lifting of props, and Kage certainly must have known that, certainly must have noticed Nezumi was wearing a ridiculously large arm cast, but he said nothing about it, and Nezumi hadn’t pointed out his broken arm either.

            It throbbed incessantly by the time he got to his apartment. It ached so badly he dropped his keys the moment he retrieved them from his pocket, was bending down to pick them up with his other hand when he heard his neighbor’s voice.

            She was young, looked like a teenager but Nezumi was certain she lived alone. Maybe she was in college, maybe one of Shion’s students. Nezumi didn’t know her name, and she didn’t know his, always called him _Neighbor._

            “Hey, neighbor.”

            Nezumi grasped his keys. Leaned against his doorframe and watched the girl walk to her door.

            “Hey,” he said to her, but he wasn’t really looking at her anymore.

            She had a newspaper under her arm, folded with the front-page headline facing outward. Her arm blocked most of it, but for the words _Dead Vamp_.

            The girl looked at Nezumi after she had her door swung halfway open. “You okay, neighbor?”

            Nezumi blinked at her. Nodded once, then turned to his own door, fumbling with his keys, finally jamming them in the lock, getting his door open, stepping inside his apartment and closing his door quickly, leaning against it.

            He pulled out his phone. Pulled up a news site, and the headlining article read _Teenage Vamp Found on Streets of Brazil, Dead from Starvation_

            Nezumi let out his breath. Felt himself slide down his closed door until he was sitting in a heap of his limbs on his floor.

            He tilted his head back against the door and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to read about a vamp who’d starved to death in Brazil. He felt relief that the vamp had starved in Brazil rather than Tokyo, but he didn’t feel relief that another vamp was dead. He didn’t feel justified, he didn’t feel vindicated. He didn’t feel anything but confused because he didn’t know what to feel.

            Nezumi felt as if he didn’t know anything anymore. As if he could count on nothing but for the alternatively sharp and dull aches shooting up and down his arm like an electrical current, steady, dependable, when everything else was not.

*

July fourth was an American holiday, but for the tourists, Karan liked to make specialty items. This year, it was vanilla cupcakes with batter dyed red and blue, with sprinkles of the same colors strewn over swirls of white icing.

            July fourth fell on a Sunday, exactly one week after Nezumi found out the truth. A week since Shion had spoken to Nezumi. Shion spent the morning in the bakery, but was soon exhausted.

            Just as he’d gone a week without Nezumi, Shion had gone a week without food. The combined deprivation had drained the energy out of Shion so that by noon, Safu had him doing nothing but sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, garnishing each finished cupcake with sprinkles when she slid the finished trays over to him.

            “Next week marks eight weeks since your mother and I last drew our blood. Just hold on until then,” she said, filling a new tray with cupcake holders as Shion dropped a pinch of sprinkles over the icing of a cupcake that had been dyed blue.

             Shion nodded, as if it was his lack of blood that he couldn’t stop thinking about. He stayed in the kitchen for another hour, then told Safu and his mother that he was going home to nap.

            Instead, he went to Nezumi’s apartment. Stood outside and knocked, as he’d done several days during the past week.

            After he’d knocked for a solid minute, Shion slumped down the door, sat on the floor to wait for Nezumi, which he hadn’t done before.

            He’d wanted to give Nezumi space, but a week felt like enough space. More than enough space. Too much space.

            When the elevator opened with a cheerful _ding!_ , Shion had been sitting on Nezumi’s hallway floor against his door for almost fifteen minutes. Out of the elevator came a young girl, who stared down at Shion as she walked towards him.

            “You’re not my neighbor,” she said, stopping to stand in front of him.

            “I’m his friend,” Shion replied. He would have said _boyfriend_ because in his head, he refused to think they’d broken up, but he knew better than to tell strangers he or Nezumi was gay. As progressive as Japan was becoming, Shion was always wary of risk.

            The girl smiled. “Friends don’t sit outside each other’s apartments. I’ve pulled the same move, it never works. When they’re done with you, they’re done with you. Anyway, I’ve learned that chasing after someone who doesn’t want you is just disrespectful to yourself in the end, don’t you think? You have to see value in yourself, even if no one else will.”

            The girl walked past Shion, but not far. She stopped at the door beside Nezumi’s, rifled around in her purse for her key, unearthed a key ring that housed several different keys and even more keychains of colorful dangling puffballs.

            She examined the key ring for a good half minute, finally plucking out one key from the rest and holding it tight, letting the others fall to the bottom of the ring. But instead of opening her door, she turned back to Shion, who was embarrassed to be caught watching her, though she didn’t seem fazed at all.

            “I wouldn’t feel too dejected if I were you. I mean, my neighbor is _hot_. You’re lucky you got at least some time with him – as _friends_ , as you like to say,” the girl said, laughing a little and winking like she and Shion were in some sort of conspiracy. “Me? I just get small moments with him in this hallway, but hey, that’s enough to keep me satisfied. And to keep me busy at night, if you know what I mean.” The girl laughed again, blushed a little, accidentally dropped the key she was holding so that it fell amongst the rest again, and she cursed quietly under her breath, adding an exasperated, “I’m such a scatterbrain!” before rifling through her keys again.

            “The time we had wasn’t enough for me,” Shion said, and the girl stopped looking for her key, stared down at Shion, who had no idea why he’d spoken to this stranger but that she was young, seemed carefree, was giggly and innocent and _happy_ , and Shion couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to anyone like her.

            The girl stared at Shion for a long moment, and he was about to apologize for possibly freaking her out, but then she was letting her arms drop to her sides, her key apparently forgotten.

            “I wish I could tell you when he’d be home, but his schedule is erratic. I used to plan my own comings and goings on when I might see him, and he used to be more predictable, I think he just went to work and didn’t do much else, but for months, since the end of last year really, his schedule just changed completely.”

            Shion thought about the first time he’d spoken to Nezumi, right before his lecture, at the end of November. He thought about the weeks afterward, the months that followed – baking with Nezumi, becoming friends with Nezumi, falling in love with Nezumi.

            “Not that I stalk him!” the girl added quickly, her eyes widening. She had a streak of red in her long, dark hair. “I’m just very observant. Read a lot of _Nancy Drew_ as a kid, you know those American books? She’s a detective,” the girl said proudly, as if she herself was this American detective.

            Shion thought about standing up. If this girl was going to launch into an entire conversation, he’d prefer to have it standing rather than sitting on the hallway floor, but the girl didn’t seem to mind at all.

            She was waving her hand, a vague gesture. “And then there were these two weeks where I never saw him at all, I don’t even think he was sleeping here, I almost thought he moved out. But then last week he shows up with this big cast on his arm, and suddenly his schedule is normal again. Just like that. Weird, right?”

            Shion didn’t have to think of a reply, as the elevator was dinging down the hall, and Shion turned just as the doors opened, revealed Nezumi, who was crouched on the elevator floor, gathering oranges and stuffing them into a grocery bag.

            The doors started closing just as Nezumi stood up, and he shot out his arm – the injured one – so that the door hit his cast.

            “Ah, shit, fuck,” Nezumi cursed quietly, as the elevator doors sprang back open.

            Nezumi still didn’t look up, was adjusting his grocery bags in his uninjured hand as he walked out of the elevator, towards his door.

            Shion forgot he was sitting on the floor. Forgot everything, on seeing Nezumi. It felt like longer than a week, since he’d last seen the man. It felt like forever.

            “Speak of the devil, and he shall appear! Hey, neighbor!” the girl said cheerfully, and Nezumi glanced up from his bags for the first time.

            “Did you just call me the devil?” Nezumi asked, but his voice fell away completely as his eyes slid from the girl to Shion.

            Nezumi stopped walking. The girl kept talking.

            “It’s an expression, certainly you’ve heard of it. You know, ‘speak of the devil,’ it hardly means you’re a devil. I don’t know how it originated, actually, there were probably some negative connotations at first, but they’ve definitely fallen away in today’s use of the expression. There’s a word for expressions like that, you know, that mean something but sound totally different than their meaning, the whole raining cats and dogs thing – What are they called? Oh boy, this is just going to drive me crazy.”

            _Idiom_ , Shion thought, but he said nothing. Let Nezumi look at him with those wide eyes again until the girl fell quiet, then spoke softly, taking in Nezumi’s fearful expression and trying to keep breathing evenly despite it. “Hi.”

            Nezumi was silent for several seconds, then seemed to take a deep breath. “You should go,” he finally said, nearly a whisper.

            Shion was fully aware of Nezumi’s neighbor still standing in front of her door, watching them. If they were going to have a discussion, it couldn’t be in front of her. He started to slowly stand up, but as he moved, Nezumi flinched, stepped abruptly back up against the opposite wall of the thin hallway, dropped his grocery bags in the process, and oranges spilled out again.

            Shion dropped back down, gathered the oranges – there were nine of them, Shion couldn’t imagine why. He had to get up to follow one that had rolled nearly all the way down the hallway back to the elevator, as if trying to escape.

            By the time he’d collected them all, having to stoop back down to pick up two that fell from his arms after he’d picked them up the first time, Nezumi was at his door, attempting to jam in the key with difficulty, his fingers shaking around it, already at a disadvantage because he had to use his left hand, and the man was right-handed.

            “Shit,” Nezumi cursed, trying to jam it in again.

            “I just want to talk to you,” Shion said weakly, staying several steps down the hall from Nezumi, holding the oranges in the cradle of his arms like they were a baby.

            On the other side of Nezumi, his neighbor watched with a look like amazement.

            Nezumi got his key in the lock. He’d picked up the two other grocery bags he’d dropped, left the empty one – the oranges one – on the floor of the hallway.

            “Wait, don’t – !”

            Nezumi slammed the door closed the moment he was inside his apartment. Shion walked forward numbly, stood in front of the closed door, could hear the turn of the lock from inside it.

            Shion exhaled hard. He felt a lot of things, but what rose to the surface first was anger.

            Anger at Nezumi for being scared of him. Anger at himself for scaring Nezumi. He kicked Nezumi’s closed door with the toe of his shoe in his anger.

            “At least come out for your oranges!” he shouted at the door.

            He received silence in response.

            “Wow, you’re _really_ not just a friend,” the neighbor said, startling Shion, who’d forgotten she was there, and an orange jumped out his arms when he turned quickly to look at her.

            “I’ll get that!” the girl said cheerfully, running after the orange as it rolled down the hall again.

            Shion didn’t bother watching her. He pressed his forehead against Nezumi’s closed door. “Nezumi. Please. You know me, none of it was a lie – Just what I am, but none of the rest, I promise, none of how I felt, none of how I feel. I love you, you know I love you, you have to know that. Please let me in, please let me talk to you, I can’t talk to you out here.”

            He received nothing but silence. Closed his eyes. Left his forehead against Nezumi’s door and wanted to collapse against it, and then the voice of the neighbor was back.

            “Here’s the or—Oh, sorry!”

            This time, Shion jumped so violently at the unexpected chirp of her voice that all of the oranges fell from his hands. A part of Shion wanted to just start laughing, watching them roll all over, watching the young girl who lived next door to Nezumi run after them.

            But Shion didn’t laugh. It was so much easier not to. He hadn’t laughed in an entire week. Even the thought of laughing felt strange, foreign.

            The girl was smarter than Shion had been, grabbed the empty grocery bag Nezumi had left on the floor and took it with her as she darted around the skinny hallway, collecting the fallen fruit.

            “Good thing they’re not apples, or they’d be properly bruised. He eats a lot of apples, actually, but I’ve never seen him eating an orange, how strange,” the neighbor said, returning, flushed, to Shion, holding out the grocery bag like it was some sort of sacred offering.

            Shion took it. Set it down against Nezumi’s door. Knocked once, spoke to the silent, closed wood. “Your oranges are out here. I’m leaving now. Come see me, okay? I’ll be at home, or at the bakery, or at Safu’s, or just text me. I’ll wait for you. If you want to break up with me, you have to do it face to face, you have to talk to me, okay? I won’t let you do it like this.” Shion had his hand flat on Nezumi’s door as he spoke, and just as he took his hand off the door, was about to turn away, it swung open again.

            “I’m breaking up with you,” Nezumi said, his voice clipped and toneless, robotic, and the door slammed again before Shion could even look at him fully.

            “Nezumi!” Shion shouted, slapping the door so that his palm stung. “Nezumi – dammit!”

            He glared at the closed door, seething, then looked at Nezumi’s neighbor at the jangle of her keys.

            She was back at her own door, plucking out her key again, sticking it in her lock. She opened her door successfully this time, peeked at Shion and gave a weak smile.

            “Remember, if he won’t give you his time of day, he’s not worth yours,” she offered.

            Shion sighed, the sound coming out more dramatic than he’d intended.

            The girl had taken a step into her apartment, glanced again at Shion, shrugged lightly. “Unless he’s the one. If he’s the one, well, he’s worth everything, right?”

            She smiled at him, a bright smile, a smile of a girl who believed in things like The One and soulmates and true love and happily ever afters, and then she disappeared into her apartment, closed the door lightly behind her so that Shion was alone in the hallway, left to think about the girl’s smile, to think it looked a little familiar.

            Like his own, he realized, only once he was in the elevator, leaving Nezumi’s apartment. The girl’s naïve and happy smile looked like Shion’s own, because he believed in all that stuff too.

            It was a vamp stereotype, that vampires didn’t have souls. Shion didn’t know if this stereotype was true. He didn’t even know if humans had souls, or if the concept of soulmates was a good thing – the idea of being split in half, incomplete, reliant on another person to feel whole, was that romantic?

            Shion didn’t know. He didn’t know if there was one right person out there for everyone, if there was one right person out there for him.

            But he did have at least one answer for Nezumi’s neighbor. There was at least one thing Shion was certain about, had no doubts about – Nezumi was worth everything.

*

Monday morning when Nezumi left his apartment, he opened the door to a bag of oranges.

            His bag of oranges. Nezumi stooped down, picked the bag up, looked inside. All nine were there.

            Nezumi didn’t care for oranges, but stage crew worked long hours. Longer than cast in the beginning weeks of rehearsal, when the crew put together all of the props. They had snack schedules, and today was Nezumi’s day to bring in orange wedges.

            Nezumi took the oranges back into his apartment, cut them quickly, tossed them in gallon-sized Ziploc bags, and was heading out again just as his neighbor’s door opened beside his.

            The girl popped out, gave him a nod. She looked sleepy, held a coffee thermos as if to prove it. The thermos was bright yellow and said “Strong Women Need Strong Coffee” in bold pink cursive.

            “Neighbor,” she said, yawning halfway through the word, lifting her thermos in greeting.

            “Neighbor,” Nezumi said back slowly.

            He had no choice but to walk with her to the elevator, to wait beside her for it to get to their floor, to get on with her.

            He pressed the lobby button while she sipped her coffee. Nezumi noticed when her eyes slid to his Ziploc bags of oranges, and she seemed to sense him watching her, as she quickly looked up from the orange slices at him, smiled suddenly, a wide, goofy smile, then resumed looking at the elevator doors.

            His neighbor said nothing to him during the elevator ride, and then they were getting off the elevator, walking through the lobby of the building to the exit together, and finally getting outside to part ways, at which point the girl merely lifted her coffee thermos at Nezumi again before bouncing off.

            Nezumi watched her run to the edge of the street, jut her arm out for not even a full second before a taxi swung right against the curb in front of her.

            She jumped in, shut the door, and the taxi drove her away.

            Even when she was out of sight, Nezumi couldn’t get her smile out of his head. There was something too familiar about it, something that made his heart feel too thick inside his chest. 

            Of course, Nezumi knew why it was familiar. He preferred to pretend it was a mystery. He preferred to pretend he’d never seen a smile like it before, to pretend he had no desire to see that smile again. Nezumi preferred to pretend that smile meant nothing to him, and neither did the man to whom it belonged.

*


	13. Chapter 13

Shion didn’t return to Nezumi’s apartment. He stopped calling and texting Nezumi – whom he guessed had blocked his number by this point anyway.

            He couldn’t stand to see Nezumi look at him in fear again, and so he decided to wait, to give Nezumi time, to let Nezumi reach out to him.

            He didn’t know if this plan would work, and thought constantly about other, better plans he could try until he was finally given a distraction from his dilemma, two weeks after the truth came out.

            Two weeks, also, of course, after Shion had depleted his blood supply, and eight weeks since Safu and Karan had drawn their blood.

            Shion was in the medical section of the library, trying to find information on healing rates for broken wrists – though it was difficult to concentrate on any text, as his head was muddy from hunger – when his phone vibrated in his pocket.

            He fished it out, saw that it was Safu, declined the call and sent her a text.

            _Busy right now. Talk later?_

            Her reply was immediate.

            _PLEASE PICK UP_

            Shion stared at the words until they disappeared, as Safu was calling again, and Shion picked up, already shoving the medical textbook he held back into its place on the shelf. He walked quickly through the aisle as he lifted his phone to his ear.

            “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

            “I’m – I’m so sorry – ”

            Shion could tell she was crying. His panic was hot over his cool skin, tightened his already shrunken stomach.

            “Is it Mom? Safu, talk to me – ”

            “Nobody’s hurt, it’s just, I accidentally – I’m so sorry – ”

            Shion had nearly sprinted through the library, was outside now, winded and glancing around, suddenly unsure of where he’d meant to be going.

            “Where are you? I’m coming to you, okay, are you at work? The bakery? Your apartment? What happened? Safu, are you okay, I need you to tell me if anything – ”

            “I’m at your place. Karan and I drew our blood, five hundred milliliters each, and I brought it to your apartment to store, and I had the two pints on your counter and was about to put them in the oatmeal cans, but then there was a sudden knocking on your door, and I just – I knew you were out and I had the sudden thought that it was Vamp Hunters coming to get you or search for evidence, and I panicked, and I meant to just really quickly hide the pints but – I don’t know what happened – the next thing I knew the pints had fallen off the counter, I must have knocked them off, I don’t even remember, and the beakers shattered and I don’t know why we even use beakers, they’re breakable and it doesn’t make any sense outside of measurement purposes, and there was blood all over your floor and glass in the blood and then your door was opening and I grabbed a box of cereal from your counter and just poured cereal on the blood because I thought that would hide it or mask it or something – I wasn’t thinking – I’ve just been so scared that something bad will happen since Nezumi found out, and then something bad did happen, but it was because of me – Oh, Shion, I’m terrible – ”

            “Safu! Breathe, just breathe, you need to breathe, it’s not your fault!” Shion said, still standing in front of the library entrance, and he walked away from it, onto the city sidewalk, looking around before he spoke again into his phone, more quietly now. “Was it – Was it Vamp Hunters? Are you okay?”

            He listened to Safu’s crying, walked to the direction of his own apartment, then stopped midstep, wondered if it was a bad idea to go there.

            “It wasn’t – It wasn’t Vamp Hunters. It was Nezu—Nezumi,” Safu said, through her sobs, and Shion clenched the phone tighter.

            “Nezumi came to my apartment? Nezumi was there?”         

            “I don’t know why, I don’t know, and he let himself in with my key, he never gave it back, I used Karan’s to get in today. I don’t know why he was there, I guess to talk to you or – ”

            “He came inside the apartment? Did you talk to him? Is he still there?”

            Safu spoke so thickly through her sobs that Shion could barely make out her words, had to press his phone hard against his ear and turn the volume all the way up. “I think he heard the glass shattering and got worried, and he let himself in, and he was in the kitchen looking down at the mess of blood and cereal, and it’s on my jeans and shoes, and he just stared at it, and I just stared at it – two pints of blood, it’s gone now, what will you eat? You can’t have nothing for another eight weeks until we can donate again, oh, Shion, I can’t believe I – ”

            “What did Nezumi say?” Shion asked, trying not to shout at Safu, knowing that if he told her he didn’t give a shit about the blood right now, it would not go over well.

            “He didn’t say anything! He just looked at the blood and then turned around and walked back out. And then I tried to salvage the blood, at least some of it, but it had soaked into the cereal, it was Captain Crunch, you know, it’s so absorbent? And the glass from the beakers was in the blood that hadn’t been absorbed, little shards that would cut your throat and hurt you, it’s just not safe to drink any of it, I tried to pick out the glass – I tried – That was all the food you were going to have, there’s no more suppliers, I don’t know what we’re going to do now, you’ve been starving for two weeks and now – Now – ”

            “Safu, listen to me. None of this is your fault. It was an accident. It could have happened to anyone. You’re already doing more than you should, giving me your blood, I don’t want you blaming yourself – ”

            “It’s all gone! You’ll starve, Shion, you’ll starve because of me! Please, you just have to let us draw more, just a hundred milliliters each, just to keep you – ”

            Shion’s panic flooded him, nearly made him nauseous, but there was nothing in him to throw up. “Safu, if you draw that blood I will never forgive you, I will never talk to your or my mother again, I’m not joking. It’s not safe, you know it’s not safe, the last time you did this you were dizzy for two days, you looked like a ghost, you can’t do this!”

            Safu cried quietly on the other side of the line. Shion listened to her sobs lessen, to the sounds of her calming down.

            “Do you think it’s any easier on me, when you look like a ghost?” she finally asked, her voice still thick and quiet, but clear now, not interrupted by sobs.

            “When I look that way, it’s not because of you. Please don’t make me responsible for hurting you, Safu, please don’t do that to me. I’m almost at my apartment, you’re still there, right? I’m almost there, just stay there.”

            Safu sniffed again. “I tried to clean up but – it’s everywhere and I just – I had to tell you – I haven’t even told Karan, she’s going to hate me, she’s going to hate me for killing her son and then I’ll have nobody – ”

            “Safu, listen to me. I’m not going to die, and Mom will never hate you, and neither will I. Everything is going to be okay.”

            “How?” Safu shouted, and then she was sobbing again.

            Shion stayed on the phone with her, walking home instead of taking the subway, which he knew would disconnect the call. He spent the next fifteen minutes reassuring her, and then he was at his apartment, letting himself in, going straight to the kitchen and ignoring the potent smell of blood that made his mouth water and his stomach ache, ignoring the sight of it on his floor covered in cereal and glass, and went straight to Safu, who stood in the middle of it, blood covering her shoes and her hands and her arms and a bit of her face, and Shion realized this must have been because she’d tried to wipe her eyes and nose from crying after she’d sifted through the blood, tried to free it from shards of glass with her bare hands.

            Shion hadn’t eaten in two weeks. He was weak and dizzy and exhausted and so hungry, but he ignored the blood that was everywhere and took his friend in his arms and hugged her tight and told her again and again that he would not die because of her, that he would never die, that everything would be fine.

            He was a vampire, and he craved blood, thirsted for it, wanted it, was desperate for it in that moment more than he had been in a long while.

            But he could ignore his hunger to comfort his friend. He would starve to death before he would ever hurt her.

            He was not a monster, and he was not coldhearted, and he was not bloodthirsty or violent or cruel.

            Shion hugged Safu as tightly as he could – despite how exhausted he was after walking for twenty minutes in the sun – and he realized that if Nezumi couldn’t see the truth in him, if Nezumi couldn’t realize Shion was not something to fear, then maybe Nezumi wasn’t the one, maybe he wasn’t worth everything, maybe they were better off without each other, just as Safu had said.

*

Nezumi began following Shion.

            The man was easy to follow. He went, mainly, to his mother’s bakery, and sometimes Safu’s apartment, but mostly he stayed at his own.

            He was deteriorating, and it wasn’t a sickness. It was starvation. Nezumi had screenshotted the photograph of the teenage Brazilian vamp who’d starved to death from the news article. He looked at the photograph and looked at Shion on the rare occasions Shion left his apartment and tried to tell how far along Shion was.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure. He didn’t know how long it took a vampire to starve. He Googled it and found hundreds of different answers, spent hours one afternoon scrolling through these answers, trying to figure out who to trust, what was true.

            Nezumi had put together several things, on learning the truth about Shion. Shion, obviously, was the Tokyo vamp that the city knew about. When that company – Discreet Meat, Nezumi’d had to Google it again to remember the name – was found, Shion began to get sick again. To starve again.

            But then he’d gotten better. Nezumi couldn’t figure that out. Maybe another supplier, but Nezumi was good with computers, had hacked into the illegal side of the web, had hacked into what he learned was called “the vamp web.” There weren’t any online blood banks available anymore.

            Nezumi began to research vamps incessantly. Stayed up entire nights after getting home from crew, his body exhausted but unable to sleep anyway from the ache in his arm. He looked at news articles of vamps being found, being killed if they were alive, though many were found dead. He read about vamps who survived on the blood of family and friends, and he realized Safu and Karan must have been giving Shion their blood, that was how he stayed alive when blood banks were shut down.

            Nezumi researched blood donations too. Medical regulations declared it safe to donate blood – a pint at a time, roughly equal to five hundred milliliters – only once every eight weeks. Nezumi Googled measurement conversion rates to understand the difference between five hundred milliliters and a pint – about three milliliters, “a negligible amount,” the blood donation websites said, either measurement would be fine to use when donating blood. He had measuring cups in his apartment, filled them with water. There were two cups in a pint. Nezumi stared at two cups’ worth of water in his measuring cup. This was what Shion had to sustain him every eight weeks. Nezumi read online that vamps were supposed to drink a pint a day, but most vamps could not do that. Most vamps stretched their pints for weeks, even months. Most vamps were starving, and that made them cold, and that made them weak, and that made them more likely to die, so they did die, and then they were found and pictures were taken of them and put in newspaper articles that celebrated their deaths and optimistically predicted their upcoming extinction.

            Nezumi overturned his measuring cup, filled with two pints of water, on the floor of his kitchen. Found a box of cereal and overturned it on the spill. Stared at the result and tried to figure out if this spill looked like the one he’d walked in on in Shion’s kitchen. Shion had a smaller kitchen, so Nezumi knew his perspective would be off, but he thought, staring at the spill for a good twenty minutes, that it seemed about equal in size.

            So Safu and Karan had given Shion a pint of their blood each – about one thousand milliliters, roughly. And then Safu had spilled all of it. And then she had poured cereal on it, which Nezumi couldn’t figure out – he assumed that must have been an accident too.

            And now Shion would go eight weeks without any blood, when already, he must have been going months with less blood than he was supposed to get, and Nezumi was back to looking at pictures of starving vamps on the internet, to stalking Shion and trying to compare his face to the faces he’d Googled.

            Three weeks after Nezumi knew what Shion was, a week after Safu had spilled Shion’s blood supply on his kitchen floor in a mess of Captain Crunch – Nezumi’s cereal, he’d bought it to keep at Shion’s apartment back when he’d wondered why they even bothered having separate apartments at all – Nezumi walked into the bakery again.

            He had been following Shion as he’d taken to doing, had waited for Shion to leave the bakery, and only then had Nezumi gone in. It was Sunday afternoon, and the bakery was closed, but Nezumi had a key. He hadn’t given back any of his keys.

            The front room was empty, so Nezumi walked through it to the back, down the hallway. Light slipped out the bottom crack of the kitchen door, so Nezumi pushed it open, revealed Karan, crying at the sink.

            Nezumi lost his voice as he watched her. Her hands were pressed hard against the sides of the sink. She leaned over it, her head bent, her cries light but still shuddering her shoulders, the curve of her back.

            Nezumi didn’t walk into the kitchen. It smelled exactly how he’d left it – incredible, like sweet fruit and flour, like the best mornings and afternoons and days of Nezumi’s life, though he hadn’t realized it at the time, he only realized it at that moment as he stood in the doorway, watching Karan cry until she stopped abruptly, in a stern sort of way, taking a deep breath and standing up straight and beginning to wash her hands as if she hadn’t been crying at all.

            “Karan?” Nezumi said quietly, and the woman jumped, pressed her wet hand to her chest, stared at Nezumi with her breath falling quickly out her lips, with the faucet still on.

            She glanced at it only secondarily, turned it off, and then her startled eyes were back on Nezumi, her hand back over her heart.

            Nezumi pushed his bangs off his face. Rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry – Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, or sneak up on you, or anything…”

            He wanted to leave. He wanted to stay forever.

            Karan looked at him in silence. Her hand curled around the chest of her shirt loosely, as if she just needed something to hold. Her shock was gone, and wariness stood in its place. Her eyes fell to Nezumi’s cast, lingered on it for a long moment, then drifted back up to his face, slowly, as if taking everything in on the way back.

            Nezumi swallowed. Tapped the toe of his boot twice against the kitchen floor – a floor he’d swept more times than he could count.

            “I just – I had to ask you – ”

            Nezumi did not know how he could ask this woman how long it would take for her son to die. He couldn’t get the words out his lips. He couldn’t speak at all, the smell of the kitchen coming to him more strongly with each second, which didn’t make sense. He should have been getting used to it.

            Karan continued to look at him. Wiped her face with her apron gently, then smoothed her hands over the fabric, the same way she did in the mornings, the gesture an abiding part of her routine in getting ready for the days’ work.

            It was her light blue “Kiss the Cook” apron. It was the one Nezumi always wore because he rarely baked with Karan, and when he did, she wore her son’s or Safu’s apron, she told Nezumi he looked especially handsome in light blue.

            “You got an order for a specialty cake today. I don’t know why I don’t turn them down, tell them you’re not baking with us anymore. I know I should,” Karan said.

            Nezumi had been thinking of a way to ask her how long it took for the average vamp to starve to death, if Shion was the average vamp, so her words confused him. It took him a moment to make sense out of them.

            “Oh,” he said, once he understood them. He didn’t know how else to reply.

            “If you have time, if you want, you can ice it now. I have the cake baked. I was going to ice it tomorrow morning. Shion used to, but he’s been tired lately. I’ve been taking over your orders, but I know it’s not my touch the customers want.”

            “Um. That’s not why…” Nezumi gestured vaguely, then found himself stepping into the kitchen.

            He went to the sink and washed his hands, a reflex. Turned to the hooks and took Safu’s apron, the one he’d worn his very first day in this kitchen.

            While he tied the apron, Karan opened the fridge. Pulled out a small circular cake.

            “It’s just a little one. She just wants your flowers. Any design you want, she said to tell you, and I told her I would, but at the time, I thought I was lying to her,” Karan said, speaking to the cake.

            Nezumi retrieved the cleaned-out icing bags, and Karan pulled out bowls of colored icing from the fridge. They were covered in plastic wrap, which she peeled back.

            Karan left his side then. Returned to the sink, where she washed the rest of the dishes while Nezumi filled icing bags with different colored icing. The cast didn’t get in his way until he tried to hold a bag to ice his first flower, and he realized he couldn’t do the same natural movements as he had.

            He looked at Karan, who was wiping the opposite side of the counter down now.

            “I can’t do it,” he said. He felt, oddly, like he might cry.

            Karan stopped wiping. Returned to Nezumi’s side. Took the icing bag from him, placed it down beside the cake, took Nezumi’s arm and held it in her hands. Her fingers trickled along the white cast until they collided with the ends of Nezumi’s fingers that weren’t covered. Her touch was warm, her skin soft. Nezumi hadn’t touched anyone since he’d touched her son, three weeks before, a hand around his throat.

            “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He wasn’t apologizing for the cake.

            “Is it broken?” Karan asked.

            “It’ll heal.”

            “Does he scare you?”

            Nezumi stared down at the blank cake. The bowls of icing, bright colors. “I’m scared he’ll die,” he finally said. He looked up at Karan, saw the concern in her face she’d always given him, the kindness. “Will he?”

            “I won’t let him,” Karan said, after a moment.

            Nezumi swallowed. Nodded. He trusted her. He knew she would give her son every drop of blood in her body to keep him alive, no matter how Shion protested. He understood this easily, looking at her face. He understood just as easily that Shion would never forgive himself, if his mother put her life at risk for him.

            Shion was not heartless. He had a heart like a human did. He had a heart bigger than any human did.

            “I don’t know what to do,” Nezumi admitted to Karan. She seemed like someone he could admit things to. Someone who would have answers for him.

            “I know, hon.”

            Nezumi clenched and unclenched his jaw. Breathed deeply. “When I see him now, I see all of them.”

            Karan tucked Nezumi’s bangs behind his ear. Her touch was light, barely there, gone too soon.

            “A vampire killed my husband,” she said. “A vampire bit my child. But when I look at Shion, I only see him. I don’t expect it to be the same for you. I don’t expect it to be easy for you. I know you feel an obligation to resent vamps. I know your life was destroyed by them, I know you saw the worst in them, and that is something that you can never be free from. I won’t ask you to love my son if you can’t, Nezumi. You have sacrificed enough in your life, and you deserve to live a life without pain now.”

            For the first time he could remember, Nezumi found no comfort in her words. “It’s not any easier now, it’s not any better without him! You should have told me, he should have told me, he knew – He let me fall – He knew about my past and he just – What did he expect? Why couldn’t he have picked someone else to be his goddamn friend? What am I supposed to do now? You have to tell me, Karan, because I don’t know, everything I’ve ever known, everything that’s happened to me – How can I just ignore it? But I can’t just go back to how it was before him, I don’t know how, I don’t – I don’t know anything anymore,” Nezumi insisted, and when Karan hugged him, he wanted to pull away, but more than that, he wanted to sink into her, and so he did.

            He let her tuck his face into the side of her neck, let her squeeze his body tightly, let her tell him it would be okay.

            He didn’t believe her. But he let her lie to him. Nezumi understood now that he preferred to be lied to. He’d thought he wanted reality, he’d thought he wanted the truth, he’d thought, after all he’d been through, that he could handle it, it would be nothing to him, compared to the past.

            He’d thought he would be stronger because of it, but Nezumi didn’t feel strong. He felt weak and lost and like a child again, so he let Karan hold him as if he was one, as if he had a mother again, as if to be held by her could make everything better, the way it had when he was young, and when the mother who held him was his own.

*

After three and half weeks without eating, Safu slept in Shion’s bed, huddled against him while he shivered still.

            The longest he’d gone without a single milliliter of blood was thirty-two days, when he was eight-years-old. On the thirty-third day, he’d drunk animal blood, and he’d felt as if his body was burning from the inside out, as if there were flames in him, unchecked, as if his skin was melting.

            His skin hadn’t been melting. It’d been scarring, the raised rope forming over his skin.

            “It’s been twenty-five days,” Safu whispered, her arms wrapped around Shion, separated by layers of his sweaters – he wore every one he owned.

            “I’ve gone longer,” he breathed back.

            “I found a website that sells animal blood. I ordered a few pints of cow blood two weeks ago. I didn’t want to tell you.”

            Shion closed his eyes. Burrowed his face into Safu’s shoulder. He didn’t want to drink animal blood. It would keep him alive, but it would torture him from the inside out, make him sick, give his body energy only so that his heart could continue to beat, but otherwise drain him of everything he had but pain. If he drank too much animal blood, it wouldn’t even keep his heart beating any longer.

            “It comes tomorrow. It’s just temporary,” Safu said.

            Vaguely, Shion felt her fingers in his hair. He hadn’t left his apartment since Sunday, coming home from the bakery. He hadn’t left his bed since Tuesday. It was Thursday now. Shion wasn’t sure if it was morning or midday or afternoon or night. He only knew it was Thursday because he’d asked Safu when he’d woken with her in his bed beside him, and she’d told him so.

            “Your mother and I will draw a little bit of blood when you can’t drink anymore animal blood. We’ll do it for as long as we can.”

            Shion’s eyes burned. He wasn’t wearing his contacts. He wasn’t wearing foundation. His roots were showing, white pricking at his hairline, slipping into his underarm hair and pubic hair.

            “An online blood bank has to pop up. Something has to change. This is all only temporary. It will get better, Shion, you just have to hold on, you just have to stay alive a little longer,” Safu whispered fiercely, speaking into the crown of Shion’s hair, her breath hot on his scalp until it faded, and all he felt was cold again.

            If she said anything else, Shion didn’t know. He passed out not even half a minute later.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mildly short chap cause the next scene is looooooooooong...and also not finished :D  
> thanks for reading!


	14. Chapter 14

Nezumi couldn’t keep following Shion because, from what he could tell, Shion stopped leaving his apartment. Nezumi skipped running crew rehearsal to watch Shion’s apartment building for a full day on Friday, almost a full month since his life had changed with the knowledge of Shion’s secret, and it was nearly midnight when someone he knew walked out.

            It was not Shion, but Safu.

            Nezumi watched her walk across the street to her own apartment building. Disappear inside, but only for a few minutes, and then she was back out, this time with a backpack over her shoulders. She was crossing the street again, and when Nezumi realized she was going back to Shion’s apartment, he ran out from the twenty-four-hour donut shop where he’d been sitting all day at a crumb-laden table against the plexiglass shopfront and caught up to her right outside Shion’s building.

            “Hey, wait!” Nezumi called, as Safu reached out to open the building door.

            She turned just as Nezumi reached her, flinging his hand out to brace against the door, doubling over from his quick sprint after a full day of sitting on a rickety plastic chair in the donut shop. He caught his breath after a minute, stood up straight to face Safu, who watched him tiredly.

            “I don’t have time to deal with you right now. He lied, it was wrong, I lied, I was wrong, you’re pissed, he’s an evil monster, I get it, all right, now can you go away?”

            Nezumi’s arm was throbbing from running. It almost felt like it was going to fall off. Nezumi pushed the pain to the back of his mind. “What’s in the backpack?” he asked.

            “None of your business.”

            “That blood you spilled two weeks ago. That was all of it, right? Two pints. From you and Karan.”

            Safu’s expression faltered for a moment, saddening for a split second before going blank. “I don’t see how this is your business.”

            “Is there – Is that blood in your backpack?”

            “Go away, Nezumi.”

            “How long does it take for a vampire to starve to death?”

            Safu slapped Nezumi before he even noticed her raising her arm. His head swung to the side, but the hit hadn’t been hard, more shocking than anything. Only the ends of her fingers had caught his cheek.

            Nezumi lifted his hand to his faintly burning skin. “What’s wrong with you?”

            “What’s wrong with _you?_ Waiting for him to starve to death so you can, what, throw a party? Get lost before I hit you for real!” Safu shouted, her voice breaking, and Nezumi had never seen the woman lose her composure like this before, stared in shock before he understood.

            “That’s not why – I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to die too, Safu. I can’t lose him too.”

            Safu blinked at Nezumi, her expression softening. Her shoulders seemed to sag. There were bags under her eyes. Her hair was greasy, hung limply in clumps against her cheeks. Her shirt was wrinkled. “It’s animal blood,” she finally said.

            Nezumi had read about animal blood online. It was painful. It hurt vamps. It kept them alive only long enough to burn them from the inside out. It was a last resort that most vamps had taken at some point, most right after the Great Slaughter, when human blood had been most scarce.

            “Can I come see him?” Nezumi asked, instead of repeating any of these facts about animal blood he knew. He was certain Safu knew all of these facts, he was certain Safu knew much more.

            Safu looked at him with the same tiredness, a little wariness now. “Will you get upset?”

            “No.”

            “Will you upset him?”

            “I won’t. I just need to see him.”

            Safu seemed to scrutinize him half a minute longer, then exhaled deeply. “Okay. As long as when you see him, you don’t start looking scared. He hates that. And it’s stupid. Get over it, Nezumi, I know you have a terrible past, but you know Shion better than to be taking out your childhood on him and acting the way you have been.”

            Nezumi’s jaw tightened, and he ran his fingers roughly through his bangs as Safu turned away from him, typed Shion’s apartment code and opened the apartment door at the buzz.

            “And Karan’s here too.”

            “I saw her yesterday.”

            At this, Safu glanced at him. “You did?”

            Nezumi nodded. They waited for the elevator, and Nezumi didn’t suggest they take the stairs. Safu didn’t look like she could handle stairs. Nezumi wondered when the last time she’d eaten was.

            In the elevator, Nezumi peeked at Safu out the corners of his eyes. “I know I shouldn’t be scared of him.”

            “Then don’t be.”

            Nezumi worked to keep his voice even. “It’s not that easy.”

            “A lot of things aren’t easy. We do them anyway,” Safu said shortly.

            Nezumi had no reply for this.

            The elevator doors opened on Shion’s floor, and Safu led the way to Shion’s apartment, slid her hand in her pocket in front of his door and cursed.

            “Here,” Nezumi said, handing Safu the key from his own pocket.

            Safu took it. Looked at it in the palm of her hand for a long moment, then looked up at Nezumi. “Why did you come here that day?”

            Nezumi didn’t have to ask. The day he’d found Safu half covered in blood in Shion’s kitchen, blood all over the floor, spotted with Captain Crunch.

            “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth. He hadn’t known what he was going to say if Shion answered the door, but Shion hadn’t answered the door, and then he’d heard shattering glass.

            Safu wrapped her hand tight around the key. “That was all the blood he had left. If he dies, it will be my fault,” she whispered.

            Nezumi took in the wide of her eyes. The desperation there. The guilt. “You’re the smartest person I know – but for Shion, maybe, but his lack of common sense gives you a good lead over him – so I know you can’t really believe that.”

            “Karan and I drew that blood two weeks ago. We can’t draw blood for him for another six weeks, not enough to make a difference to his health. I can give him a little bit every once in a while, he’ll be too weak to protest soon enough, but it won’t be enough after a point.”

            _How long does it take for a vampire to starve to death?_ Nezumi didn’t ask this time. Pointed at the door.

            “Can I see him now?” he asked gently.

            Safu looked at him hopelessly, but unraveled her fingers from the key, opened Shion’s door and led Nezumi in.

            Karan was lying in bed with her son. She sat up as the door opened, looking at Nezumi for only a second without any surprise, then focusing on Safu.

            “Was it delivered?”

            “I have it, it’s in my backpack, I think we should give it to him now.”

            “He’s asleep,” Karan said, looking down at the small mass beside her that was completely covered in blankets.

            “We’ll have to wake him, it’s best we just get this over with. Lock the door behind you, Nezumi,” Safu said, without looking at him, as she went to the bed.

            Nezumi did as he was told, then lingered at the foot of the bed. He hadn’t been in Shion’s apartment in almost a month. When he’d left it last, it was with EMTs guiding him out the door. Shion had already left, and the moment Shion was out the door, Nezumi had felt the pain of his broken arm suddenly, in a flash, a piercing, violent pain that nearly had him screaming out.

            Now, the pain was only a dull ache, and Nezumi forgot about it completely. Watched as Safu crouched beside Shion’s bed, let the backpack drop carefully from her shoulders.

            “He’d want you beside him, if you’d like that.”

            Nezumi stared at Karan, who smiled gently at him, a ghost of a smile. She looked as exhausted as Safu did.

            Nezumi nodded once, and Karan slipped off the bed. Nezumi walked to the side of it, took her place, the sheets warm from where she’d lain.

            Safu was unzipping her backpack, still crouched on Shion’s side of the bed. “Can you wake him?” she asked, while she plucked out three small white tubs marked with writing in a language Nezumi didn’t understand, though there was a biohazard symbol on the lids.

            Nezumi sat stiffly on the bed, leaving a few inches between himself and Shion. He reached out, pulled the blankets down from where they nearly covered Shion’s face. There was a scar on his cheek, raised and pink.

            Nezumi retracted his hand from the blankets. He hadn’t known this was the scar Shion had. The same kind Nezumi had painted on his own skin with crushed berries.

            “If you have to leave, do it before he wakes,” Safu said.

            Nezumi let out his breath slowly. Reached out again, touched the blanket gingerly. “I don’t have to leave,” he whispered. He pulled the blanket down further, to Shion’s shoulders. He could see Shion’s neck now, the way the scar wound around it. He thought about touching it, but didn’t.

            “Shion.” Nezumi kept his fingers over the blanket when he shook Shion’s arm gently. “Hey, time to wake up.”

            Shion sighed. His lips moved soundlessly. His skin was sallow and thin.

            Nezumi lifted his hand. Touched Shion’s sweatered shoulder. Traced along the covered shoulder, hesitated, then let his fingers drift to Shion’s neck, his fingertips shaking over Shion’s cool skin. Nezumi made sure not to touch the scar, only the pale skin around it.

            He lifted his hand. Touched Shion’s cheek just barely – around the scar again, wary of it. “Wake up, professor.”

            Shion’s eyelids fluttered, and then his eyes were opening, and he rolled onto his back just as he opened them, looked up at Nezumi.

            Nezumi drew back quickly. Jerked his hand from Shion’s skin. The man’s eyes were a vivid red, the very color of blood. Nezumi’s breath left his lungs. In an instant, he felt hollowed and sick and winded.

            “Nezumi?” Shion breathed.

            Nezumi couldn’t speak.

            “You said you wouldn’t upset him,” Safu was saying, from what seemed like far away, miles away.

            Shion’s red eyes didn’t leave Nezumi’s face. Watched him tiredly, softly, lighter than air.

            He had the eyes of a monster, and he looked like one, but more than that, he just looked like Shion. Even though Nezumi could barely breathe, he could see this, he could still see Shion despite the flashes of memory that flooded him.

            Nezumi realized he was clutching the blanket beneath him tightly. He tried to relax. He tried to forget, but it was impossible to forget with red eyes blinking up at him, bleary and exhausted.

            “If you can’t stay, leave. This will be hard enough without him having to feel like shit because you’re basically shaking in fear,” Safu said, standing up now, then sitting on the edge of Shion’s bed on the other side of him, almost protective.

            In one hand she held one of the white tubs. They were small, and Nezumi tried to think back to his measuring cup to distract himself from the red eyes. Maybe a cup and a half of blood was in there. The lid was open, and Nezumi could see inside it, a dark red liquid that looked almost black.

            In Safu’s other hand, she held a straw.

            “Safu, there’s no need to be rude,” Karan said gently. She sat next to Safu on the bed now, squeezed Shion’s leg underneath his blankets, but her eyes were on Nezumi. “If you have to leave, that’s okay, honey.”

            On her face was fear as well, but it wasn’t fear of her son. It was fear of what was happening to him. Nezumi thought about her crying in the sink in the bakery kitchen. Looked at Safu, thought about her in Shion’s kitchen, blood at her feet, cereal spotting it.

            “That will hurt him, right?” Nezumi asked, looking at the animal blood again. He’d read online that cow blood was best, but usually the blood was mixed, from several species of animals even when the suppliers said it was pure. Sometimes it was diluted with water, and there were different theories for that – it would be less harmful for vampires. It would make suppliers more money.

            “It will keep him alive,” Safu said. She set the tub on the nightstand with the straw, leaned over to wrap her arm under Shion’s back. “You have to sit up, you have to drink some of this now.”

            Nezumi didn’t want to look at Shion again. He did so only carefully, out the corners of his eyes and without really letting himself focus, saw only that Shion was still watching him as Safu helped him sit up against the headboard.

            “I think we might be better off without each other,” Shion said to him, his voice barely there.

            Nezumi closed his eyes. Thought about the photographs of dead vamps that were all over the internet. This was what they looked like. Shion was what they looked like.

            When Nezumi opened his eyes, he made himself look at Shion fully. Tried to ignore the race of his heart, the way his palms sweat, the tightness of his chest and his own shallow breaths, the overwhelming reflex to run – but he couldn’t.

            He couldn’t shove all of it away when it was right in front of him. He couldn’t do anything about his panic, rising fast up his throat, persistent.

            Nezumi pushed himself away from Shion. His legs shook when he stood up from the bed. Blood rushed to his head, a swooping feeling.

            “Nezumi – ”

            “Let him go, Shion,” Safu said quietly, as Nezumi managed to stumble away from the bed, away from Shion, his palm pressed to his lips.

            He didn’t leave the apartment. He went to Shion’s bathroom, leaned against the sink, his elbows digging into the sides of it as he turned on the faucet and dry heaved. He felt the stale donut – all he’d eaten that day – as if it were lodged in his throat and swallowed quickly until the choking mass of it went down again.

            Over the running water, over his thick and thudding pulse, he could hear Safu from the main room. “It’s just three hundred fifty milliliters, you have to drink all of it, okay?”

            He could hear Shion’s voice, a faint whisper, “Not yet, I can survive a little longer without – ”

            And Karan – “It’ll be okay, baby. I know it hurts, but you need to drink just a little bit.”

            Nezumi stared at the running faucet. His heartbeat was still too urgent, his stomach still turned and clenched and rolled. He had to think of something other than the red eyes – not just Shion’s, all of them, and the mouths dripping in blood, and the screams and the cries and the fire and the burning, pale skin, the smell of it, acrid and charred, filling his lungs alongside the smoke. He made himself think instead about his research on vamps, how the internet had described the pain of drinking animal blood as drinking fire. Unlike human food, which just made vamps nauseous, animal blood felt like hell, and Nezumi knew what hell felt like, had scars of his own to prove it.

            He didn’t want Shion to feel that. Shion must have already, since he had a scar of his own, proof of his own of the hell he’d survived, but Nezumi couldn’t imagine having to go through that more than once in a lifetime. Whatever else Nezumi felt about Shion – feelings he couldn’t name, couldn’t untangle – he didn’t want Shion to hurt, to burn the way his family had, not again.

            “Wait,” Nezumi said, so quietly to the stream of water he wasn’t sure if he had spoken at all, if anyone could hear him.

            “Ignore him, Shion.”

            Nezumi pushed himself up. Turned off the faucet and made it to the doorway and leaned against the bathroom doorframe, looked only at Safu, who sat on Shion’s bed with her back to him, was holding the small tub of blood forward, angling the straw so that it was inches from Shion’s lips.

            Nezumi focused on Safu’s back. “Safu, stop. He can have mine.” His voice came out a whisper, shaky, uncertain.

            Safu turned, blinked at Nezumi. “Your what?” she asked, just as Shion said, faintly –

            “No.”

            Nezumi ignored Shion. Looked only at Safu. “How do you do it? Do you have some kind of – A needle or – ”

            Understanding shifted Safu’s expression. She set the tub of animal blood on the nightstand, said quickly, “A syringe, yes, in my backpack, I’ll get it.”

            She slid off the bed, and Nezumi stared at the floor. Tried not to think about anything.

            “Nezumi, no – Safu, you can’t – I don’t want – You can’t do this – ”

            Nezumi looked at his own arms, the thin green veins beneath his skin that he’d rarely given thought to before. The cast on his right arm stopped just before Nezumi’s elbow, left the veins in the crease of it exposed, so he assumed either arm would work.

            “Mom, don’t let him – ”

            “Shh, honey, don’t try to get up, it’s okay. Nezumi, are you sure you want to do this? You have no obligation.”

            Nezumi didn’t look up from his veins. “Yes,” he managed, but he wasn’t sure at all.

            “Thank you, Nezumi, you can’t know how much this means to us.”

            “Found it!”

            “Safu, stop,” Shion hissed.

            “It’s harmless. You take my blood and Karan’s.”

            “You’re my family,” Shion said. He sounded desperate. Without looking at him, it was so easy to believe he was human. To believe everything else was the lie.

            “You’ll die otherwise,” Safu was saying.

            “I’ll drink the animal blood!” Shion protested. “I still have time!”

            “Come.”

            Nezumi looked up from his veins. Safu stood right in front of him, holding a syringe and a thick beige rubber strap and a small glass container. A beaker, like scientists used. To measure, Nezumi realized. To make sure she didn’t take too much blood from him, to make sure she didn’t drain him completely.

            “We should do it in the bathroom, away from him. He’s already agitated,” Safu said calmly, like Shion was an unruly child who didn’t know what was best for him.

            Nezumi nodded. He was glad not to have to return to Shion’s side.

            “Safu!” Shion shouted, but his shout was faint – fainter, when Safu pushed Nezumi gently back into the bathroom, closed the door behind her.

            Shion’s bathroom was small. Nezumi looked around it, feeling lost, unsure, trapped.

            “Sit on the toilet, you should sit, you might get lightheaded. You already look faint, you have to try not to pass out. Take some deep breaths – but not too deep, it’ll just make you dizzier.”

            Nezumi closed the lid of the toilet. Sat on it, and Safu sat on the ledge of the tub across from him. She set down the beaker on Shion’s light blue bathmat, the syringe inside it, and held up the beige rubber strap.

            “The syringe is unused, I keep dozens of them at home, don’t worry,” Safu said. “Which arm?”

            “What’s that for?” Nezumi asked, not offering an arm, pointing at the strap. His finger shook, so he stopped pointing.

            “To tie around your arm. It puts pressure on your veins, makes them more defined, so it’s easier to draw blood.”

            “Oh. Right.” Nezumi was aware he’d known this, but his thoughts had become slow and wispy. But he had lived on the street for a while as a child. He’d seen people tying their arms with rubber straps like this, to push their veins right up against the surface of their skin. Of course, in the alleys of Tokyo where Nezumi had slept, people did not do this to donate blood.

            “I’ve done this many times. I do it to myself and Karan. I know what I’m doing, so you can trust me, I won’t take more than you can handle. But you can’t pass out. You should put your head between your knees a little before I start, you really look pale. Have you ever donated blood before?”

            Nezumi let Safu push his head gently down until he was hunched over, staring at the closed toilet lid between his knees. “No,” he said. His voice sounded as faint as Shion’s had. When blood rushed to his head, he felt no less dizzy.

            “People do it all the time. It’s harmless.”

            Nezumi didn’t say that it was not the giving blood that he felt sick over. He knew Safu was aware of this.

            He was feeding a vampire. He was using his own blood to keep one alive. Hadn’t his family given enough blood? Hadn’t enough been taken from them? From him?

            Nezumi pushed himself up, elbows on his knees, ignored his spinning head. Took in Safu’s expectant expression. “Safu, I can’t.”

            Her face hardened. “You can save his life.”

            “I know that.”

            “You said it yourself. You’ve lost enough. You don’t have to lose him too. We don’t have to lose him, Nezumi. It’s just a little bit of blood. It’s not your life. Your body will replace it easily. This isn’t a sacrifice.”

            “How can you ask me to do this?” Nezumi demanded. He slid back on the toilet seat until his back hit the tank, away from her and the strap and the syringe and the beaker. “Anyone else – ”

            “There is no one else. How could I not ask you? I should have asked you weeks ago,” Safu argued, her voice strained.

            Nezumi shook his head. Tried to slide farther back, but the toilet tank blocked him.

            Safu leaned forward on the bathtub ledge. “I have no family, Nezumi. I’m just like you. You think you’re the only one that’s alone? Everyone I had is gone, and Karan and Shion, they’re my family now. I can’t lose them. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to save your family if you could go back? Wouldn’t you be desperate, too? I’d give my life for Shion. I’d give him all my blood, and if you won’t do it, then I will. I will, I’ll do it.”

            She stared at Nezumi fiercely, as if daring him to challenge her, but he didn’t doubt her. He understood. She would do anything to save him. Nezumi would have done anything to save his family. He would have given his life, but the vamps hadn’t wanted it, they hadn’t offered him a chance to exchange.

            Safu pointed at the closed bathroom door, and Nezumi looked at it, as if he could see Shion through it, lying in bed, just skin and bones and blood red eyes.

            “They’re all I have. Either help me save them, or get out of here,” she whispered.

            Nezumi continued to look at the door. When Safu first closed it, he’d heard Shion’s faint protests, he’d heard Karan speaking softly to him. Now, he heard nothing.

            He slid forward slowly, to the edge of the toilet seat. Offered his broken arm. It already ached. “Take everything you can,” he told Safu. His voice didn’t shake. He didn’t feel certainty, but he didn’t feel uncertain either. He felt nothing.

            Safu didn’t hesitate. She sat straighter, leaned forward, wrapped the rubber strap around his upper arm. The rubber pulled at his skin. She tied it tight, so that it hurt, but Nezumi didn’t wince.

            She held his arm by the cast, pulled it straight to reveal the vein of Nezumi’s inner elbow. It was more visible at the crease, bulged slightly, and Safu picked up her syringe, slid the tip of it into the pale green.

            “If blood makes you nauseous, look away,” she said.           

            Nezumi didn’t look away. Watched as Safu pulled the stopper of the syringe, felt an odd, sharp tightening along his inner arm, then a quick swooping sensation through his entire body. He braced his other hand on Shion’s bathroom wall and sucked in a deep breath.

            “Sorry,” Safu whispered. “I shouldn’t have pulled the stopper so quickly. Just breathe.”

            Nezumi kept watching. The syringe was filled, and Safu took the needle from his vein, pushed the stopper down as she held it above the beaker, and Nezumi washed his blood splash into it, a deep, dark red now that it was free from him.

            When the syringe was empty, there was hardly any blood in the beaker. Definitely not five hundred milliliters.

            “I have to do it a couple times,” Safu said quietly.

            Nezumi watched her eyes dart quickly to his face and away again. “This isn’t how blood donations work.”         

            “Karan had the right equipment, but it got worn out from use, and she was never able to replace it. That was years ago. This stuff isn’t so easy to come by anymore, with the vamp stigma. The right type of needles are called gauges, they’re different than syringes, and there’s different kinds of them, numbered. Twenty-one gauges are the ones that are best for drawing smaller amounts of blood, like for routine blood tests. Sixteen and seventeen gauges, those are best for blood donations. But authorities know people buy gauges to supply vamps, so it was all taken off the market except in bulk, for hospitals to buy. We can’t afford that. So we buy syringes. It takes a while to draw blood like this, so take a deep breath, I’m going to stick your vein again.”

            Nezumi took a deep breath. Safu slid the syringe in his vein again, a pain that hadn’t been there the first time. He closed his eyes, leaned against the wall beside the toilet.

            “You do this to yourself?” he asked her.

            “I’d do anything for him. It used to make me queasy too, but I got used to it. Karan used to draw my blood when she finally let me – she wouldn’t let me donate until I was sixteen. But now that she’s older, I draw hers. Her hands shake after a few syringefuls.”

            Nezumi felt the needle leave his arm. Heard the spray of blood into the beaker. Felt Safu’s hand on his arm again, and then the needle was back.

            “How many more?”

            “A lot.”

            “What happens if I pass out?”

            “Don’t.”

            “Shion doesn’t know it’s like this. One pull of the syringe at a time like this.”

            “No. He thinks we still have that old equipment, the stuff hospitals use to draw blood, gauges and tubes and bloodbags, that it’s just one stick and then waiting for the bag to fill and that’s it. He doesn’t need to know it hasn’t been like that for years.”

            “Is it dangerous like this?”

            Safu was quiet for a moment. Took the needle out. Emptied it in the beaker. Nezumi didn’t bother opening his eyes to look at how full it was by now. He didn’t want to know.

            Safu stuck the needle back in. Nezumi’s arm was sore. His hands were sweating, as was his back, his underarms, his forehead. He tried to keep his breaths even.

            “If I accidentally push an air bubble into your vein, you could die. But I won’t do that. Like I said, I’m good at this. I’ve done it for a long time, Nezumi.”

            Nezumi didn’t question why Safu was doing all of this for Shion, why she’d done it for years. He knew why. Shion would do the same, without thought, for Safu. For Nezumi. For anyone he could.

            “How are you feeling?” Safu asked, after some degree of time Nezumi was unable to fathom. He had long since lost count of how many syringefuls Safu had taken.

            He had slid down from the toilet seat a few syringes ago, sat on Shion’s bathroom floor now, fully against the wall. His head felt light and heavy at the same time. He’d stopped feeling his arm for a while now.

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi opened his eyes. Blinked blearily. Made himself focus on Safu’s concerned face.

            “Just one more,” she said.

            He nodded against the wall. “I can’t believe you do this to yourself.”

            “Like I said, I’ve been doing it for years. I’m used to it. I know to take care of myself before I draw blood too, I drink a lot of water and eat properly. What have you eaten today?”

            It was more difficult than it should have been to remember. “A shitty donut,” he finally said.

            “What? All day? Oh, Nezumi. You should have said that. No wonder you look so pale, you should never donate so much blood without eating properly.”

            Nezumi murmured in response, hearing nothing coherent leave his lips, unable to repeat whatever he’d been trying to say – he couldn’t remember what he’d wanted to say anyway.

            His eyes had closed again. He felt a pulling on his upper arm, and then a strange and uncomfortable prickling sensation sweeping through his entire arm.

            “I took off the strap, your arm will feel weird for a little bit, that’s okay. I’m going to help you lie down, you shouldn’t try to stand up. Just don’t move, I’m going to bring you something to eat, I had no idea you hadn’t eaten at all, you really should have mentioned that, this isn’t healthy.”

            Nezumi couldn’t tell if Safu sounded worried. It was hard to focus on anything.

            He wasn’t sure if he fell asleep, if he blacked out, or if no time passed at all before he was opening his eyes again, a cool towel pressed to his forehead, Safu speaking quietly to him.

            “Wake up, Nezumi, come on.”

            Nezumi groaned, the sound faint. He felt like he was spinning, wanted to stop. He closed his eyes and decided he wouldn’t open them again, ever.

            “Drink this. It’s a straw, open your lips a little and just drink.”

            Nezumi opened his lips. Felt a plastic straw between them, let it slide between his teeth.

            “You have to drink it,” Safu repeated, and Nezumi was glad for the reminder as he’d forgotten. He sucked on the straw, and cool liquid flooded his mouth, something sweet but mostly tasteless. Nezumi kept drinking, took a break, drank more, and then his head stopped feeling so foggy, and he was able to think, and the first thought he had was the image of Safu offering Shion animal blood with a straw sticking out the small tub.

            He gasped abruptly, inhaled the sweet liquid, and started choking, shoving himself off the floor onto his hands and knees and coughing out what liquid was still in his mouth.

            “Nezumi! Calm down, breathe, you’re okay.”

            Nezumi kept coughing. Opened his eyes and saw that whatever liquid Safu had given him was in a large water bottle and was clear.

            “That’s not animal blood,” he managed, when he could speak. His voice was hoarse.

            “Of course not, why on earth would I give you animal blood?” Safu demanded.

            Nezumi collapsed back against Shion’s bathroom wall. His arm pulsed with an angry ache. He still felt tired.

            “It’s sugar water, you needed sugar. Here, eat this, it’s bread and butter, not an animal, if that’s what you were going to ask. And eat the Poptarts too, I’m assuming you bought those for yourself anyway because they were in Shion’s cupboard, and the prop foods he gets aren’t usually sweet things.”

            “I’m fine,” Nezumi muttered, reaching out for the sugar water again, plucking the straw from the bottle and throwing it onto Shion’s floor – the tile wet from when Nezumi had coughed sugar water all of it. He lifted the bottle to his lips, chugged the rest of the water quickly, then set the empty bottle down, swiped the back of his hand – his left hand, uninjured and undrained – across his lips.

            “You’re not fine. You’re an idiot, not telling me you didn’t eat anything before you let me draw your blood. Sit there and don’t try to stand up, or you’ll faint again and crack your head open this time. And eat this.”

            Nezumi blinked at her, then took the plate of food she held out, knowing it was easier than arguing with her. He looked around the bathroom, couldn’t see any of the blood drawing supplies or his own little beaker of blood.

            “Did you give it to him?”

            Safu had been wiping the mess of sugar water Nezumi had made from the tile with toilet paper. She threw out the balled-up toilet paper and settled onto the floor, crossing her legs and reaching out to break a chunk of a Poptart from Nezumi’s plate. She ate it herself, chewed slowly and swallowed before she replied. “Yes, he drank it.”

            “All of it?”

            “Half. It’s hard enough to ration it, he’s been starving for almost a month, and we just want to give him everything we can. But it isn’t a good idea to give him all at once. Still, the way it works is once he wakes, he’ll look like he’s instantly recovered. It’ll be shocking, I guess you’ve seen it before though, but it’ll make you think he’s going to be okay. That’s not the case. Blood just has a quick effect on vamps, both in energy and appearance, but it’s quick to go as well.”

            Nezumi nibbled on the edge of a piece of toast, then realized how hungry he was, started eating it quickly until Safu grabbed his arm.

            “Don’t eat so fast, you’ll be sick.”

            “How long will the rest last him?”

            “I don’t know. It’d be nice if we could make it last a few weeks, but I doubt it. Sometimes he’s good at rationing, and sometimes it’s harder. It might be harder now since he’s already gone a month with nothing.”      

            Nezumi was trying to eat more slowly, but it was difficult. Safu took another chunk of Poptart from him, but Nezumi didn’t say anything. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in too long as well.

            “Did he say anything?” Nezumi asked, once he’d finished all three slices of toast and was breaking off pieces of the remaining Poptart.

            “About what?”

            Nezumi shrugged. Chewed his Poptart and looked around the bathroom. “I don’t know. How it tasted.”

            Safu smiled faintly. “I’m sure you were very sweet to him, Nezumi.”

            Nezumi felt hot, stared down at his plate that was nearly empty now. “He hates sweet things,” he muttered, and Safu laughed, the sound surprising.

            “He’d passed out again, and we had to wake him to drink it. He didn’t even protest, I don’t think he remembered it was yours, and Karan and I didn’t tell him, and he was too hungry to turn down fresh blood anyway. And then he fell asleep again, before I got to ask for a taste review. You can ask him tomorrow when he wakes.”

            Nezumi broke apart the remaining quarter of his Poptart but didn’t eat it. Kept breaking it until it was nearly crumbs, and then Safu’s hand was on his wrist again.

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi dropped the crumbs of Poptart. Set the nearly empty plate to balance on the ledge of the bathtub and looked at her.

            “At least for now, you saved his life.”

            Nezumi looked down at his arm. Safu must have applied a cotton ball when he was passed out, and a band-aid over it. From what he could see around the band-aid, the cotton ball was a little bloody, only the outer edges of it still a fresh white.

            “This shouldn’t be something you regret. You love him. I know you do.”

            “I thought he was human,” Nezumi told the band-aid.

            “So what happens now? You’ll never speak to him again?”

            “I saved his life, isn’t that enough?” Nezumi asked, looking up from the band-aid.

            “Saved his life for now,” Safu reminded.

            “I can’t do this again. I shouldn’t have done it at all.”          

            “He didn’t want your blood. That’s not what he wants from you.”

            “What about what I want?” Nezumi demanded, and Safu tilted her head, her gaze soft over Nezumi’s features.

            “What do you want, Nezumi?” she asked gently.

            Nezumi stared at her. He’d been asking himself the same thing for weeks, and the only thing that came to mind was the same thing he knew he couldn’t have. “I want him to be human again.”

            At this, Safu sighed lightly. Reached up, tucked one side of her greasy hair behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said softly. “That would be nice.”

            Nezumi tilted his head back against Shion’s wall, settled in the corner of the wall and the side of Shion’s bathtub. He still felt a little weak, and really, he was not in any rush to leave Shion’s bathroom.

            As much as he felt he didn’t belong here anymore, Nezumi had nowhere else to go.

*


	15. Chapter 15

When Shion woke – feeling alive and incredible – he heard Safu and his mother talking quietly in the kitchen area and planned on joining them after he took a shower, which he hadn’t done in days. On opening the shower curtain, however, Shion found Nezumi lying in his bathtub.

            He jumped back, hit his hip on the edge of the sink, nearly shouted but slapped his hand over his lips in time to stifle himself.

            “Shion? Where – Oh, there you are, when did you get out of bed?” Safu appeared in the bathroom doorway. “Oh, yeah, he fell asleep here and neither Karan or I could carry him, so we put him in there.”

            Once his initial shock wore off, Shion noted that Nezumi was indeed sleeping on one of his blankets that either Safu or his mother must have placed to cushion the hard porcelain of the tub. Nezumi had a pillow too, and slept on his side, loosely curled, his knees drawn, his hair scattered, his exhales slipping out his parted lips in slow, faint whistles – the sound of Nezumi’s soft sleeping breaths so familiar it made Shion’s chest ache, almost made him gasp.

            “You look good. Really good. I’ve seen you recover fast before, but this – I don’t think it’s ever been so drastic. How do you feel?”

            Shion hardly heard Safu’s words. He had been examining Nezumi’s peaceful, curled body and was just noticing the edge of what looked like a band-aid peeking out of the crease of Nezumi’s bent elbow.

            Shion crouched down beside his tub. Reached into it, glanced at Nezumi’s sleeping face first – eyelids still closed, breath still whistling – before picking up Nezumi’s wrist by his cast and stretching out his arm.

            The band-aid held down a bloody cotton ball.

            Shion stared at it, then replaced Nezumi’s arm exactly as it had been, gently. He stood up. Faced Safu, who watched him somehow both warily and with her face set in determination.

            “He offered. You needed it,” she said.

            “Somehow, I don’t believe you,” Shion hissed back, keeping his voice low so Nezumi wouldn’t wake. He grabbed his toothbrush, toothpaste, and a pair of contacts. He examined himself in the mirror – he looked healthy, healthy enough for _Warm Silk_ over _Ghost Kiss,_ so he grabbed a tube of _Warm Silk_ too. He pushed his fingers through his hair, examining his white roots, and dug out a box of his root touch-up hair dye as well before pushing past Safu out the bathroom.

            “Where are you going?” Safu asked, closing the bathroom door behind her before following Shion into the kitchen.

            “I don’t want to wake him.” Shion put his contacts in first, not needing a mirror to do so.

            “Oh, honey, you look so good,” Karan said happily, stepping forward from the sink counter where she leaned with a coffee mug in her hands. She set the mug down, hugged Shion once he had his contacts in.

            “Mom, you didn’t stop Safu from forcing him to donate?” Shion asked, when his mother pulled away from him, took his face in her hands, smiled widely at him.

            “I did not force him!” Safu protested.

            “That’s almost as bad as nonconsensual bleeding,” Shion snapped, whirling on Safu once his mother let go of his face.

            “Are you kidding me?” Safu asked, an outraged whisper.

            Shion angrily squeezed toothpaste on his toothbrush, wet the bristles with the sink faucet before jerkily brushing his teeth.

            “She didn’t force him, sweetheart,” Karan said.

            “You did?” Shion demanded, accidentally spraying his mother with toothpaste, but she didn’t seem to mind as she reached for a napkin from the side of the counter and wiped at her shirt.

            “Nobody forced him. I’m not surprised you don’t remember, you fainted only a minute later. Nezumi volunteered himself.”

            Shion usually liked to brush his teeth for the recommended two minutes, but he quickly spit in the sink, rinsed his mouth, and pointed his wet toothbrush at his mother, then Safu, unsure who to assign the bulk of the blame. “I don’t believe that.”

            Safu had her arms crossed and looked close to rolling her eyes. “Honestly, Shion, what do you think we did? Tied him up and took his blood?”

            “It happens,” Shion said, putting down his toothbrush and yanking off his sweaters. He picked up the tube of _Warm Silk,_ had to peel off the sealing plastic, as he’d grabbed a new tube rather than the open one. He ripped it off roughly. “I’d believe that more easily than Nezumi giving a vamp his own blood.”

            “Ridiculous,” Safu muttered. “Like you’re just some random vamp to him. Really, Shion? And I can’t even be properly mad at you because you look so healthy, I’m too happy to inform you how stupid you’re being.”

            Shion just shook his head, not entirely convinced. Even so, he held the tube out to his mother after he’d coated the parts of his scar on the front of his torso with _Warm Silk._

            “Mom, can you get where it goes up my back? I don’t know where my scar is without the mirror.”

            Karan took the tube, and Shion turned around, felt his mother’s cool fingers on his skin a moment later, skimming his shoulder blade quickly.

            “Are you going somewhere?” Safu asked.

            “Where would I be going?” Shion asked, feeling his mother’s fingers rise up to his neck and turning around so she could get the front of it.

            “You’re putting on foundation, and everyone in here knows you’re a vamp.”

            Shion said nothing, was allowed the excuse to stay silent as Karan was covering the scar on his cheek now.

            It was Karan who answered. “It’s for Nezumi.” Her gaze flicked up from Shion’s cheek to his eyes, and she smiled gently. Shion knew she understood.

            “Nezumi saw your eyes and scar last night, or do you not remember that either?”

            Karan’s fingers were off Shion’s cheek now. She held his hand out, started coating the portion of the scar on his arm even though Shion could have reached that himself.

            “It doesn’t bother me to cover it, Safu.” Shion did not remember Nezumi volunteering to give his own blood the night before, but he did remember opening his eyes to see Nezumi beside him in bed. He did remember Nezumi recoiling from him, he did remember Nezumi’s fear – different than it had been before. More potent. Not just fear but panic. Triggered, Shion knew, by not only the knowledge of what Shion was, but the sight of him. Shion knew he must have looked exactly like the vamps in Nezumi’s nightmares, in Nezumi’s past.

            When Karan finished with his scar, she picked up the root touch-up kit, read the insert while Shion readied the dye. He’d dyed his roots countless times on his own, but didn’t mind his mother’s help, especially without a mirror.

            Shion expected Safu to tell him it was useless to disguise himself as a human when Nezumi knew the truth and needed to face it at some point. Instead, she leaned closer to him, began pointing out places in his hair for Karan to coat. Shion closed his eyes. Leaned back against the counter with his head bowed, let his mother and Safu sift through his hair, search for patches of white. They discussed his white hair happily, laughed when Karan accidentally painted Safu’s fingertips with the dye brush when she was too slow to pull them back from a white patch she’d been pointing out, and Shion couldn’t help but smile at his socks. He knew they were happy that he was healthy again, and as much as he didn’t like the idea of someone else making sacrifices for him, he was relieved to have drunk Nezumi’s blood.

            He felt good, alive, energy coursing through him and his heart beating firmly, and it was hard to be upset when, for the first time in nearly a month, Shion was not worried he’d be dead by nightfall.

*

Nezumi woke in a bathtub.

            He didn’t realize this at first, and couldn’t figure out where he was waking, or why it was so cramped. He hit his elbow hard – right at that tender nerve, that goddamn funny bone when there was nothing funny about it – trying to stand up, and cursed swiftly under his breath, sank back down into what he realized was a bathtub only when he found himself staring up at a faucet.

            Shion’s faucet. Nezumi blinked at it. Peered around himself, rubbing his elbow as waves of bright pain shot up and down his arm. Definitely Shion’s bathtub, as there was the striped blue shower curtain, and the tiles stretching above the walls of the tub, and he was lying on Shion’s blanket.

            Nezumi tried to sit up again, more carefully this time. The blanket beneath him made it difficult not to slide right back down into the slippery tub. On successfully standing, he braced himself with a hand against Shion’s tile shower wall, noted that someone had taken off his boots, as he stood only in his socks.

            He opened the shower curtain, stepped out of the tub. Stretched and peed, and as he washed his hands, he examined himself in Shion’s mirror above the sink. His hair was a mess. Nezumi attempted to flatten it, and when that didn’t work, he just tied it up into a bun, then washed his face with cool water. Shion’s toothpaste tube wasn’t perched in its usual spot at the corner of Shion’s sink, so Nezumi bent down, opened the cupboard below the sink and sifted through items.

            He opened a new toothpaste, squeezed a glob on his finger and rubbed it over his teeth with one hand as he rummaged through Shion’s cupboard with the other.

            He found the items he was looking for at the back. Tubes of foundation, two different shades. Nezumi read the sides of the tubes. _Warm Silk. Ghost Kiss._ He picked up a tube of _Ghost Kiss._ Misaki used the same brand, the same shade. She called it “the color of death,” used it whenever someone had to play a corpse.

            Nezumi threw the tube back into the cupboard. Glanced at boxes of hair dye – Natural Dark Brown – and pushed past them to stacks of contact lens boxes. He opened a box of contacts, pulled out a smaller box – a pack of six, it claimed – and ripped free two little plastic contact packets from the ones beside it. He stood up, rinsed the toothpaste out his mouth before opening one of the contact packets. Plucked a contact from its little pool of liquid, balanced it on his finger. There was a dark brown ring, almost black, on the inside of the otherwise clear contact, to cover the iris, Nezumi knew. He looked at himself in the mirror, then pulled up his left eyelid with one finger, pressed the contact into his eye with another. He’d never put in a contact before. When Nezumi pulled his finger away, the contact was still perched limply on his fingertip rather than in his eye.

            “What the fuck,” Nezumi murmured. He tried again, pushed the thing against his eyeball, and when he dropped his hand the contact was still in his eye, but it was folded in half. When he blinked, it drifted onto his cheek.

            “Goddammit…”

            Nezumi brushed it off his cheek, didn’t bother looking where it fluttered off to, and opened the other contact packet. The small amount of contact solution inside of it dripped down his finger and slipped quickly beneath the hard casing of his cast as he picked the contact up again. He tried again, more slowly this time, and it actually went into his eye.

            Nezumi’s vision didn’t change. He blinked a few times. The contact felt cool, a little heavy against his eye. He hadn’t thought he’d feel it at all.

            Nezumi stared at himself in the mirror – one eye brown, one silver. He ducked down again, grabbed the six-count contact box again, ripped free another individual contact packet, stood up and opened it and stuck the contact in his right eye.

            Nezumi blinked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were not the same color as Shion’s. They were a lighter brown, and Nezumi suspected this was because his iris was silver underneath it, a lighter color than red.

            Nezumi didn’t want to think about Shion’s red eyes. Watched himself in the mirror, the strange appearance of himself with brown eyes a surprisingly good distraction. He kept eye contact with his reflection as he freed his hair from its bun, combed his fingers through it, braided it slowly over one shoulder, the monotonous and familiar movements calming his suddenly quick pulse.

            When Nezumi finished the braid, he leaned closer to the mirror. It amazed him, the difference eye color could make. He was fascinated in his brown-eyed self. Could have stared at himself for a good amount of time, but then he heard the sound of a door opening, and he glanced at the closed bathroom door, which stayed closed.

            It was the front door that was opening. Nezumi drifted to the bathroom door, opened it cautiously, saw that Shion was coming into his apartment, toeing off his shoes as he closed the front door behind him. He threw his key on the floor beside his shoes before noticing Nezumi.

            “Oh. Hi. I was just using the bathroom next door, I didn’t want to wake you, but I could only hold it so long,” he said, smiling a tentative smile, pointing with his thumb over his left shoulder, as if to indicate the direction of his neighbor’s bathroom. “I told them my plumbing was – ” Shion stopped talking abruptly, but Nezumi hardly noticed this, was hardly paying attention to anything Shion was saying.

            He was distracted by how Shion looked. Human. Healthy. Healthier, at the very least. Like the man Nezumi had known, skinny but alive, brown eyes and brown hair and clear skin and not a corpse.

            It took Nezumi’s breath away to see this Shion that was familiar. This Shion Nezumi had thought was human.

            Now, Nezumi knew better. He leaned back, wary of this man who didn’t look like a vamp the way he should have. It was just a disguise. It was all a lie.

            “Why does it look like – Your eyes – Are they – Oh. _Oh,_ are you wearing my contacts?” Shion sounded confused. He sounded human. He could have been human, so easily, everything from the past month could have been a dream, a nightmare, and Nezumi was used to nightmares, had them nightly, it wasn’t so outlandish that this had been a nightmare too, it wasn’t so impossible that his nightmares had slipped into his days.

            Nezumi looked down at his arm. There was a band-aid over a cotton ball on the inside of his elbow above his cast, and Nezumi pulled these free from his skin, revealed several small red marks on the inside of his elbow.

            Not a nightmare. Nezumi exhaled slowly. Felt almost lightheaded, leaned against Shion’s bathroom doorframe. When he looked up from his elbow crease, it was to see that Shion had walked forward, stood halfway into his main room between the front door and the bathroom now, and Nezumi immediately stepped back, into the bathroom.

            Shion raised his hands. “Sorry. I – I’m sorry, I know, I know.” He spoke sadly. He looked so human Nezumi could hardly stand it. He wanted Shion to take off his stupid disguise, but he was so relieved at the same time not to have to see what Shion was, not to have to see that scar and those red eyes again.

            “Safu tried to stay but she was nearly falling asleep, she hadn’t slept in days I don’t think, and my mom had to leave to open the bakery. I wanted them to stay so we wouldn’t be alone, but they just left, they had to leave, we can go somewhere public if you want, anywhere you want, the bakery even or anywhere, I just want to talk to you, I just think we should talk.” Shion spoke quickly and quietly, as if worried Nezumi would run away from him at any moment.

            He needn’t have worried. Nezumi couldn’t run. He was trapped. Shion stood between him and the only exit.

            “It’s so strange to see you with brown eyes,” Shion said softly, after a full minute of silence had passed.

            Nezumi, too, had been looking at Shion’s brown eyes. But they weren’t strange. They were normal, they were human, they were right, they were the Shion Nezumi recognized, the Shion he’d loved hard and sure enough to pass the point he could deny, to pass the point he wanted to deny, the Shion he’d let himself wish – only in the quietest moments of the night, only when he was half-asleep and couldn’t stop himself – he might be allowed to spend his life with.

            “Are you going to say anything to me?” Shion asked, voice small now, but every tone of his voice, every way that he looked at Nezumi – it was so unbearably human Nezumi hated him for it, for knowing how to disguise himself so well, for knowing how to fool people so well, to trick them, to trick Nezumi, to make him believe it so hard it hurt, to make him want it so much he hated himself even more than he hated Shion.

            Nezumi gave himself a moment before speaking to be sure his voice would come out calmly, would not reflect the quick of his pulse. “Last night, you said we might be better off without each other.”

            Shion’s jaw tightened, Nezumi could see the flinch of skin. Skin that looked smooth and scarless, but it wasn’t, really.

            “I hadn’t eaten in a month. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

            “You were right.”

            Shion shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “I wasn’t. You just need time, you need time to get accustomed to this, and that’s okay – ”

            “Accustomed to what? The truth? How can I get accustomed to it, when you’re standing there pretending to be a human again – ”

            “I’m not _pretending_ – ”

            “So it’s just for fun, then, the contacts and the make-up – ”

            “I didn’t want to scare you!”

            “It’s not what you look like that I give a damn about, it’s what you are!”

            Shion stepped closer, and Nezumi stepped back from him again, was next to the sink now, watching Shion warily through the open bathroom doorway.

            “It’s what I look like too, Nezumi. I make you remember them. I trigger memories that you don’t want. I’m a physical representation of the monsters from your past, but none of that has anything to do with me, with who I am, with right now. It’s just what I make you remember, that’s all it is.”

            When Shion stepped closer again, Nezumi stayed where he was. He could kick the door shut from where he stood. If he stepped back, the door would be out of reach.

             “Not having a family isn’t just a memory. The burns on my back aren’t a memory.”

            Shion’s shoulders dropped. He wrapped a hand in his hair for a moment, tightened his fingers around the brown locks – but they weren’t brown, really, that was a lie too – then dropped his hand so that it fell limply, slapped his thigh. “Do you really think I’ll ever hurt you, Nezumi? Is that what you think?”

            Nezumi stared at this man who’d made him feel whole again, after Nezumi had long since discarded the feeling as unattainable. This man who’d made him happy, this man who’d made him fall in love, this man who’d made him wonder if surviving – even the way he had, even without anyone else – had been worth it after all.

            “You already have,” Nezumi said quietly, and when Shion stepped forward again, Nezumi kicked the bathroom door shut so that it slammed, walked forward quickly and locked it.

            He was trapped inside Shion’s bathroom now, but it was better than being anywhere near him.

            Nezumi didn’t think Shion would kill him anymore. He didn’t think Shion would bite him or suck his blood straight out his jugular. He didn’t think Shion would do anything to him.

            Shion had already done enough. Made Nezumi want him, made Nezumi love him, made Nezumi realize he wasn’t content to be alone, there was nothing rewarding in being alone, it was awful and it hurt to be alone.

            Hadn’t Shion done enough to him? Wasn’t everything he’d done already unforgivable?

            Nezumi pressed his hand – the left one, unbroken – flat against the closed bathroom door. Looked at the span of his own fingers. Shion had pressed his lips to every single segment of every single one of Nezumi’s fingers. To his fingertips and his knuckles and the creases that lined his palms and the thin web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. There wasn’t any part of Nezumi Shion hadn’t touched. There wasn’t any part of him the vampire had left unmarked.

            “You’re not the only one who lost part of yourself to vampires.” Shion’s soft voice came from right outside the door, and Nezumi retracted his hand, held it in a fist to his chest, stared at the door as if he could see Shion standing right in front of it.

            When he glanced down, he could see the shadows of Shion’s feet blotching the light that snuck through the bottom of the door.

            “I’m always starving. I’m always hiding. I’m always scared. I lost the ability to live freely as a human to a vamp. Don’t let me lose you too.” Shion’s voice broke, and something inside Nezumi felt broken too.

            Nezumi looked away from the shadows of Shion’s feet. At himself in the mirror, was startled to find his eyes were still brown. He’d forgotten he’d put contacts in them. Even though the rest of him was the same, Nezumi didn’t see himself when he looked in the mirror. He saw a stranger, and as he stared, he wondered if Shion saw a stranger in the mirror too, or if the contacts were not the disguise, if the red eyes were.

            Nezumi turned away from the unfamiliar reflection. Reached out, opened the bathroom door slowly. Stepped back so his body wouldn’t be in the way of the door, found Shion indeed right there in front of him, brown eyes and brown hair and no scar, and Nezumi didn’t know if this was a lie. Maybe this was the truth, and so were the red eyes, and so was the white hair, and so was the scar. Maybe there wasn’t a difference.

            Nezumi’s chest felt too tight. He couldn’t think. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand how he could have been wrong his entire life.

            “I stopped wishing I was human a long time ago. I’ve known better than to wish for something like that since I was a kid,” Shion said gently, cautiously, and Nezumi was glad he stayed outside the bathroom, as if the door was still closed and stood solidly between them. “You made me wish for it all over again, more than I ever have in my life. I’m not ashamed of being a vampire. I don’t think of vampires as monsters, even after what they did to me, even after what they did to you. Some of them are terrible, just like some humans are terrible. But there is nothing in me that could ever want to hurt you. That is not a natural part of me, that isn’t something that I have to push down, that isn’t something I’m wired for. I only wish I was human because I know the idea of loving a vamp is hard for you. I hate to make anything hard for you. I hate that, Nezumi, I hate that I’m doing this to you. But I’ve given up so much in my life, and I can’t give you up too.”

            Nezumi watched Shion take a deep breath, let it out slowly. The professor watched Nezumi warily, nervously. Like Shion was the one who had a right to be nervous. Like he was the one at risk. Like Nezumi was the one who could hurt him, and Nezumi, for as much as he felt, didn’t want Shion to think that.

            “Did you practice that?” Nezumi asked, after a moment, to take away that nervousness, and Shion smiled then, a small smile, tentative, unsure, but it was enough to loosen the tightness in Nezumi’s chest.

            “There was supposed to be more, but I forgot a lot,” Shion admitted. “It’s your eyes, they’re distracting me. It’s amazing how different you look.”

            Nezumi didn’t bother looking in the mirror again. Didn’t want to look away from Shion’s smile, but then it was gone, dissolved right from his lips.

            “Do you still want me?” Shion asked, and Nezumi would have thought it was the stupidest thing the man had ever said, but he could barely think anything with Shion looking at him like that.

            Like Nezumi was the dangerous one. Like Nezumi was the one who could break Shion in half.

            “If you don’t, I understand. I said what I had to say. You know how I feel. I can’t change how you feel, and if being around me is worse for you than anything else, then…” Shion swallowed. Stayed on his side of the open doorway. Didn’t come any closer, so it was Nezumi who had to step forward, and again, even with his heart beating louder as he did so, even with his palms sweating, even with his skin prickling with heat, even with every instinct in his body warning him to stop.

            He stood in front of Shion. Reached out. Shion’s eyes left his face, slipped to Nezumi’s hand, and Nezumi knew his fingers were trembling but there was nothing he could do about that.

            Shion said he wasn’t wired to hurt him, but Nezumi was wired to be terrified, had been since he was seven years old. He couldn’t turn off his fear. But he could make his own decisions despite it. He could have wants despite that.

            He touched the skin of Shion’s face where he knew the scar was, underneath the make-up, underneath the disguise. The skin was raised beneath his fingertip, one thing Shion couldn’t disguise.

            “You’re shaking,” Shion told him.

            “No, I’m not,” Nezumi lied. A futile lie, when Shion could clearly feel otherwise.

            “I know you loved me before. I know everything is different now for you. You don’t have to love me anymore,” Shion whispered, as Nezumi made himself lean closer. He could see the edges of Shion’s contacts. He knew what was underneath now. His heart shook his entire chest.

            “Yes, I do,” Nezumi told him back, and when he touched his lips to Shion’s, he knew Shion would feel his heartbeat in them, he knew Shion would feel how it raced, he knew Shion would understand that Nezumi was wired to feel panic, to feel terrified, horrified, the urge to run almost stronger than his refusal to do so.

            He knew Shion would feel everything he did, when they kissed. He realized he wanted Shion to feel all of it. To take some of it from him. To lessen it for him.

            Shion didn’t move when Nezumi kissed him. Stayed perfectly still. Nezumi closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his closed eyelids, saw red eyes and blood-smeared lips. He parted his own lips. Kissed Shion a little deeper, with more pressure, enough to feel the warmth of him, enough that he couldn’t pretend it was just wind against his lips.

            Enough so that he couldn’t deny that he was kissing a vampire. Enough so that he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening. Enough so that he’d remember it, a memory of a vampire that wasn’t bad, that didn’t hurt.

            When Shion finally responded, leaned forward and kissed Nezumi back, lips opening, hard exhale falling into Nezumi’s mouth, Nezumi thought his heart would break the cage of his ribs, it beat so hard, it shook his whole body.

            Shion’s fingers curled along the side of Nezumi’s neck, and Nezumi gasped, felt the fingers freeze on his skin, then abruptly fall away. Shion’s lips left his, but Nezumi leaned forward again.

            “It’s okay.”

            “Nezumi – ”

            “I need you to touch me,” Nezumi told him. He needed different memories of vampires than the ones he’d had, and every memory with Shion before this didn’t count. He hadn’t known, then, what Shion was. In those memories, Shion was human. They weren’t enough to quiet his heart. They did nothing to break his instinct to panic, to rewire his impulse for fear.

            Shion was shaking his head, moving back again, but Nezumi stepped forward, made himself reach out, catch the loose fabric of Shion’s sweater, pull him.

            “I need you to prove it to me. Everything you said. That you won’t hurt me. I need you to show it to me. I need this, Shion. Prove me wrong.”

            Shion looked uncertain, and Nezumi felt the same. Felt worse than uncertain. His stomach turned. His throat was tight. His hand was a fist around the front of Shion’s sweater, his knuckles white. He could see Shion’s eyes flicking over his face, taking everything in, and Nezumi knew his expression wouldn’t be any better than the rest of him.

            “I want to change. I need you to help me,” Nezumi confessed, knowing he needed to say it because he couldn’t show it, his body would betray him, reveal every instinct that he was trying to push down. He couldn’t rely on actions. He had to speak. “I’m stupidly in love with you, professor. I don’t know anything else, but I know this.”

            Shion didn’t smile. He watched Nezumi, looked a little miserable. “I hate scaring you.”   

            Nezumi said nothing. He hated being scared, but it was an obvious thing, something that didn’t need to be said.

            Shion looked at him for another moment, then pressed his hand to Nezumi’s chest. Nezumi breathed deeply. Willed his heart to calm down, but it wouldn’t.

            “I’m sorry,” Shion said weakly.

            Nezumi nodded. Felt Shion’s fingers curl around the chest of his t-shirt, and then Shion was leaning forward, and Nezumi’s heart beat faster, and Shion kissed him, and Nezumi’s breath shuddered into Shion’s mouth, but Shion didn’t pull away.

            His other hand slipped around Nezumi’s neck, then up into Nezumi’s hair. It was still braided over Nezumi’s shoulder, so Shion’s fingers were unable to run through it, settled at the base of Nezumi’s neck, curled into the ends of his hair there.

            Nezumi knew he had to touch Shion back. His right hand was casted, cumbersome, useless, throbbed and ached, so Nezumi left it at his side, relieved not to have to touch Shion with both hands at least. He made his left fist loosen from Shion’s sweater. Touched Shion’s waist gently, above his sweater, as Shion kissed him still, lips trailing off of Nezumi’s, along Nezumi’s jaw, lower to his neck, and Nezumi knew his breaths were too loud, knew his entire body had gone stiff, knew his eyes were shut tight.

            “Nezumi,” Shion whispered to the underside of his neck.

            “Keep going,” Nezumi breathed back.

            Shion didn’t keep going. He pulled away. Hand left Nezumi’s hair, other hand left Nezumi’s chest. He touched Nezumi’s wrist, and Nezumi opened his eyes, saw that he was gripping Shion’s waist too tightly, nails digging through Shion’s sweater into his skin.

            “Sorry,” Nezumi breathed. It was a moment before he remembered how to unlatch his hand. He felt dizzy. Heat flooded through him, courses of it, not a good heat.

            Shion was shaking his head. “This isn’t right. I can’t do this. I understand what you’re trying to do, but this isn’t going to work, I just can’t touch you when you’re terrified of me.”

            “I’m fine,” Nezumi said, but he was relieved when Shion pulled him to the wall beside the open bathroom doorway, pushed him gently against it like he knew Nezumi’s legs were weak, about to give out, that he could hardly stand.

            “You look like you’re going to pass out, that’s not fine, and I won’t keep doing this to you. I know you want to trust me, but we can take our time to get to that point. We don’t have to have sex right now, and I absolutely won’t do anything with you when you’re scared of me. I know you don’t want to be. I know you want to change that. I want to help you, but not like this. Let’s just spend the day together. Let’s just be near each other. I know that’s already a lot.”

            “I’m not some pathetic – ”

            “I never said you were pathetic. I don’t think that, and you shouldn’t either. I just think we should take this slowly. There’s no need to rush.”

            Nezumi closed his eyes. Concentrated on not sliding down the wall. His heart still beat too hard against his chest but was not so rampant as it had been with Shion touching him.

            “It’s almost like at the beginning,” Shion was saying. “Remember? How we had to take it slowly?”

            Nezumi opened his eyes. Examined Shion’s small smile. It looked forced now, and Shion’s eyes weren’t crinkled with happiness, but in concern.

            This was nothing like the beginning.

            “So we’ll take it slow. Agreed?”

            Nezumi nodded. Shion’s concern didn’t lessen, but his smile, at least, seemed less forced, and Nezumi’s heart – gradually –  lessened its frantic pounding inside his chest.

*

The bakery was safe because Nezumi liked to bake, and there was Shion’s mother in the front room, along with handfuls of customers – other people, so even though it was just Shion and Nezumi in the kitchen, they weren’t really alone.

            There was the distraction, also, of the baking itself. Nezumi was trying to learn to ice with his left hand. His flowers were sloppy globs. He cursed frequently, but his cheeks were less pale, his eyes less wide, his terror less evident all over his features, and Shion felt able to look at him again without feeling his own chest clench.  

            Even so, Shion stayed on the opposite side of the counter as he began a batch of mini chocolate cheesecakes. He was still trying to whisk into softness the block of cream cheese ten minutes after they’d left Shion’s apartment and come to the bakery when Nezumi shouted.

            “This is ridiculous!”

            Shion looked up in time to see Nezumi squeeze the icing bag so hard the top nozzle shot off from the bag, skidded across the counter to knock into Shion’s mixing bowl. Icing splattered out the open hole of the bag.

            Shion caught the nozzle. Held it loosely and watched Nezumi push his bangs roughly off his face. There was icing all over his fingers, thick white streaks painting his dark hair.

            “Why don’t you do something else?”

            “I can get this,” Nezumi muttered, picking up the icing bag again and staring at it as if he had no idea why the nozzle was gone.

            “Here.” Shion rolled the nozzle across the counter instead of walking over.

            Nezumi had put down the icing bag. Had taken to glaring at the cast on his arm, and Shion looked at it too. Sometimes he thought he could still hear the crack of Nezumi’s bones inside his grip. The loud _snap!_ of them. A sickening, horrifying sound.

            “Does it hurt still? Did the doctor give you painkillers?”

            Nezumi had stopped glaring at his cast, started reattaching the nozzle to the icing bag with his left hand with what looked like difficulty.

            “I don’t like painkillers.”

            Shion frowned. “Would you rather be in pain?”

            “Painkillers dull your senses, your reflexes,” Nezumi said, then looked up from the icing bag – still without its nozzle – to blink at Shion. “We could try that.”

            “Try what?”

            “If I was on painkillers around you, my reflexes would be slowed, I wouldn’t feel – ”

            Shion stiffened. “We are not doing that. Don’t even say that. Don’t ever say that to me again. You are not going to rely on painkillers to be around me, to kiss me, to do anything with me. I can’t believe you said that,” Shion said, having to force the words out the tightness of his throat.

            To his surprise, Nezumi didn’t retort. Looked at Shion for a long moment, then sighed, looked resigned more than anything, tired. “I’m trying,” he said quietly, at the icing bag again, finally succeeding in getting the nozzle on.

            Shion felt gutted. “I know that.”

            Nezumi looked at him again, fingers stilling on the icing bag. “Just standing here in the same room as you, it’s not just that you remind me of the vamps. You remind me of my family.”

            Nezumi hadn’t taken off the brown contacts. Shion hadn’t reminded him to. When he looked less familiar, it hurt less, to see fear on his face. To see sadness there.

            “I don’t know what reminder is worse,” Nezumi admitted.

            Shion was about to walk around the counter, to touch Nezumi’s face, to take Nezumi’s hand in his, to hold the man to his chest, then remembered he couldn’t. He shouldn’t. It would make it worse.

            “I hate that being near me hurts you. But you have to know that insisting on taking painkillers just so you can stand being around me, that hurts me, too.” Again, unwillingly, Shion wondered if they’d be better off without each other. How was this better than anything they could feel in the absence of each other? “Nezumi, maybe – ”

            “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have suggested that, it was a stupid idea.”

            Shion took a breath. Reminded himself again it was better that the entire counter was between them, it was better not to go to Nezumi, not to tuck his bangs behind his ear, not to kiss him softly.

            “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t worth it to me. It is,” Nezumi said, as if he’d read Shion’s mind, and Shion realized he’d been digging his fingernails into the skin of his palms, focused on relaxing his fingers.

            “If it makes you sad to even look at me, how is that worth it? What’s the point, Nezumi? I want you because you make me happy. I don’t make you happy anymore.”

            “I’m making you happy right now?” Nezumi asked.

            “Well, not right now, but – ”

            “It’s not any different for you than it is for me. Yeah, it sucks to be around you. The fact that you’re a vamp scares the shit out of me, I hate it, I don’t know what to do about it. But not being here is worse.”

            “So I’m just the lesser of two evils? Be alone or suffer around me?” Shion demanded, and Nezumi’s face softened, his expression fell.

            “Shion. I – I’ve never tried to make anything work with anyone, and with you, it’s a thousand times more difficult than it should be. I have no idea how to do this. My whole life has been hard, and I’ve gotten through all of it, but you’re not something I want to get through. I don’t want to survive you. I don’t want to get over you, I don’t want to move on. It was so goddamn simple to fall in love with you. Everything else was hard, and is hard, and right now, this is hard, saying all this shit right now like you do with your stupid speeches all the time, who knew it was this hard? But I’m doing it because I want a chance at this.”

            Nezumi’s fingers were wrapped tight in his bangs, getting more icing in them. He didn’t seem to notice, and Shion didn’t point it out. He felt warm all over, and as much as Shion loved Nezumi’s quiet gaze, the mystery of his silence and lingering, focused looks, Shion liked this too, Nezumi’s voice, Nezumi’s thoughts unfiltered, the mess of him. 

             “You’re a fucking vampire, and I want a life with you, somehow, you make me want that, and right now even though it sucks, and I feel like I’m having a goddamn heart attack every time you come near me, that’ll go away. I just need time to let it go away. You said you’d give me time. You said we could take this slow.”

            Shion waited another moment in case there was more, but Nezumi looked spent. His fingers unraveled from his hair, fell out, left more icing behind. He gave Shion a helpless look.

             “I just said all that shit and sounded like a complete idiot, can you say something now?” Nezumi asked, almost angrily, and Shion laughed without thinking, the sound just coming out of him.

            He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed. It amazed him, how easily he laughed now, without having to practice, without having to learn it all over again.

             “I don’t think you sounded like an idiot,” he offered. “That was nice. Not everyone mocks people whenever they say something honest.”

             “You would say that,” Nezumi muttered, looking down at his fingers and seeming to realize suddenly there was icing all over them. “Shit, this is in my hair, isn’t it?”

            Shion watched Nezumi hold strands of his hair in front of his face, grimace at the icing on them.

           “Dammit,” he muttered, walking around the counter to the sink, but the sink was on Shion’s side of the counter, and when he reached for the paper towels – the roll beside Shion, as he’d had to clean a smear of cream cheese from the counter five minutes earlier – he flinched back the moment he noticed Shion standing inches away from him.

            Nezumi exhaled hard after flinching, a frustrated exhale, and leaned against the sink – away from Shion.

            Shion watched him sadly. “I heard everything you said, Nezumi. I believe you love me. I know you don’t want to let go of anyone else that you love. I know you think it’s worth it to do anything not to go through that loss again. But, it’s just…my mom said something to me weeks ago about how you’ve never been allowed to have an easy life, how this would make it harder. I don’t want to make it harder. I don’t want to be something that’s hard for you.”

            Nezumi looked at him in that way he did. Eyes brown and unfamiliar, but the rest the same. Quiet and focused, a careful examination, as if searching, but Shion had no other truths to give him. There was nothing else, no bigger secret that could make his other secret more bearable. Nezumi knew everything now.

            “Nothing is easy without you,” Nezumi finally said, simply, and then he turned to the sink, ducked down and flicked up the faucet and began to wash out his hair.

            Shion watched the back of him. Wanted to pull on the small bow of the apron string tied against his lower back, wanted to turn the man around in his arms, wanted to kiss him or just hold him tight, just feel the solidity of Nezumi’s body against his own.

            Shion wanted so much, but to have Nezumi in the same room as him, wanting to be there, wanting to stay with him – for now, that was enough.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, so chapter updates are gonna be slower now (as you can prob tell) cause i've just gotten assigned a cumbersomely long manuscript to edit - this is contracted work on top of my full-time job, so now a lot of my free time is, well, gone, and what little free time i have left i largely spend just lying on my floor staring at the ceiling numbly. 
> 
> i'll update as quickly as i can though, and as always, thanks for reading! :D


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fast update despite yesterday's psa cause i love to put off my responsibilities like a fool! ...also it's sunday  
> thanks for reading! :D

Nezumi waited beside Shion while he locked up the bakery. It was a Saturday night in late July, and the streets were bright and busy, the sun only three quarters of the way down.

            Nezumi was exhausted. He’d slept in a bathtub the night before, after all. His arm throbbed, and he held it against his chest with his left arm, a lame cradle. He had a sling at his apartment but hated wearing it, the immobility it gave him. He’d healed from worse without any doctors at all. He knew he’d be fine.

            “I guess…will I see you tomorrow? Here?” Shion asked, turning from the locked door, and Nezumi looked away from the setting sun that he’d been watching.

            “Tomorrow,” he repeated slowly. He’d assumed he’d be going to Shion’s apartment. He wasn’t sure, thinking on it, if this was a stupid thing to assume.

            “Or, if you’re busy tomorrow, I understand,” Shion was saying quickly.

            Nezumi squinted at him. Thought about agreeing, but they’d had enough lies between them. “I thought I’d spend the night at your place,” he said, carefully, watching Shion’s expression.

            The man’s surprise wasn’t subtle in any capacity. “You want to spend the night?”

            “Aren’t we back to being…” Nezumi let go of his cast to gesture vaguely.

            “Boyfriends?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi found the word insufficient but didn’t argue. He held his cast against his chest again. It throbbed to the beat of his heart, a steady rhythm.

            “I think so. I want to be. I just thought you wouldn’t want to sleep over so quickly again. I mean, you’d be in my bed, right? I don’t have a couch or anything. And that’s close proximity.”

            “I’m aware of the proximity.”

            “We’re taking it slow, remember?”   

            “Are you saying you’re incapable of sleeping in the same bed with me and preventing yourself from jumping me in the middle of the night?” Nezumi asked, and Shion frowned.

            “I’m saying you’re already standing at least two full feet away from me right now, when you’re fully awake and we’re outside in public. Sleeping is a vulnerable position.”

            “Ah, I see, so that’s when you’ll kill me. Don’t go giving your plan away.”

            Shion had his hands on his hips. “I’m just trying to make sure you feel safe!”

            Nezumi tried to flex the fingers of his right hand. Sometimes his arm felt entirely numb, and he worried what state it would be in once they got the cast off. “Seeing as I’m proposing it, you can assume I feel safe with the idea.”

            “This morning you proposed forcing yourself to make out with me, and you didn’t feel safe, so I don’t think I can really assume anything when you’re concerned,” Shion shot back.

            Nezumi had no desire to argue on the sidewalk with Shion. He was exhausted enough as it was. “Do you really have to be so difficult? I want to sleep at your apartment. If I start freaking out, I’ll be sure to leave. If you don’t want me there, just say so.”

            “I do want you there, of course I want you there.”    

            “Then why are we standing here talking about it still?” Nezumi demanded, and that was how, a little less than an hour later, he found himself in Shion’s bed.

            He’d showered first on getting to Shion’s apartment, finally taking off the brown contacts and recognizing himself in the mirror again. While Shion had showered, Nezumi had looked for his own blood. He’d assumed it had to be refrigerated, then wasn’t sure why he’d assumed that, as the human body averaged ninety-eight degrees, and he’d closed the fridge and freezer doors and scoured the cabinets. Moved every item of dishware, shifted around the random food items that he understood now were just props, just parts of Shion’s disguise. He couldn’t find it, wondered if Shion had drunk the rest that morning, or maybe while Nezumi had been showering.

            That didn’t seem smart. Shion still had six weeks to go before Safu or Karan could give him blood again. Eight weeks before Nezumi himself could, and he’d glanced down at his veins again on thinking this, wondering if it would come to that.

            On hearing the shower spray turn off, Nezumi went to Shion’s bed. Laid down carefully. He usually slept in only boxers, but tonight he’d kept his t-shirt on, and he pulled at the fabric vaguely, considered taking it off, that Shion might think it meant something, as if Nezumi had kept it on purposefully as some useless barrier between them.

            Maybe that was why Nezumi had kept it on. It was certainly hot enough that Nezumi would normally have slept without it.

            He sighed, didn’t take his t-shirt off, laid on his back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds Shion made in his bathroom, the muted rummaging, the sink faucet, the gargling and shuffling and urinating and toilet flushing and then the door opening, and Nezumi turned his head to watch Shion come out.

            His scar was covered on his cheek and neck, and his eyes were brown. Nezumi felt his body relax on the mattress and tried to ignore this.

            “You shouldn’t sleep in contacts.”

            “I’ll take them out when you fall asleep,” Shion said, standing at the edge of the bed.       

            Nezumi felt his skin prickle, a heat he ignored as well.

            “What if you fall asleep first?”

            “I’ll take them out when you close your eyes, then.”

            “I’ll close them now.”

            “You can keep them open until I settle.”

            “Because you think I’ll be more likely to freak out if my eyes are closed,” Nezumi said dryly, but Shion looked at him seriously.

            “You might.”

            Nezumi exhaled hard. Stared back at the ceiling. Felt the mattress depress slightly on Shion’s side and listened to the sounds of him slipping beneath the blanket.

            When Shion was still, Nezumi understood immediately that he should not have argued with Shion outside the bakery an hour earlier. He should not have proposed sleeping at Shion’s apartment.

            He tried to breathe evenly. He closed his eyes, then opened them quickly, because to close them was worse – of course, Shion had to be right about that too.

            “You’re freaking out,” Shion said quietly.

            “Shut the fuck up.”

            “Just go sleep at your apartment. Don’t torture yourself.”    

            “Did I just say something about shutting up? I’m trying to sleep here.”

            “Your eyes are wide open.”

            Nezumi clenched his jaw.

            “Look at me,” Shion said, and Nezumi couldn’t think of any good that could come out of it, but he turned his head away from the ceiling, saw Shion lying on his side, facing him.

            The man looked so human Nezumi wondered, again, if everything was a joke. He’d believe it so easily, if Shion told him none of it was real. He’d accept it immediately.

            “Why are you making yourself sleep here?” Shion asked. He was bundled in blankets as usual.

            “Did you drink the rest of my blood?” Nezumi asked back.

            Shion opened his lips. Closed them. Opened them again. “Why are you asking that?”

            “I couldn’t find it.”

            “You want it back?” Shion asked, looking bewildered.

            “Obviously not. I just wanted to see how much was left. It’s all you’ve got until Safu and Karan can donate again, right?”

            Shion was quiet for a moment. Then said, “I didn’t drink all of it. I have a little less than half left. I’m trying to make it last at least a month.”

            “Will you be able to?”

            “We don’t have to talk about this.”

            “I want to talk about it. Where is it?”

            “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stretch it out. It might be easier now. I feel less hungry when I’m with you. You distract me from it, so that’ll help. And I keep it hidden.”

            “But you don’t have to anymore, to hide it. I know what you are,” Nezumi said, looking slowly between both of Shion’s eyes. The brown he recognized. It looked real. No hint of red beneath them.

            “It’s not just for you. I don’t expect them to come to my door, but I always have to be ready for Vamp Hunters. They used to do raids, I’m just used to hiding my blood. I always have to be cautious.”

            Nezumi had completely forgotten about the existence of Vamp Hunters. He hadn’t even thought about the fact that society hunted vamps, which meant society hunted Shion. If he was found, he’d be killed.

            “Has it ever come close? Have you ever come close to being found? How’d you even get hired at the university?”

            Shion shook his head, his dark hair rustling against his pillow, clumps of it still wet from his shower. “There were screenings for my job at the university, but Safu found this dye that can be injected into the iris temporarily so that it changes color, designed to help vamps pass screenings. For my university job, the screening process didn’t even include hair or scar checks or blood tests, they just made sure we’re not wearing colored contacts. The stereotypes against vamps was useful in my case. People aren’t so suspicious of vamps in academia because they don’t think vamps can be educated.”

            Nezumi thought about the word Shion had used. _Stereotypes._ He knew a lot of his own beliefs were stereotypes. He wondered which were not – which were true.

            “What’s inside of you, if you don’t have blood?” Nezumi asked. He wanted to know. He wanted the truths, he wanted none of the stereotypes. He’d put some of it together from research, from experience.

            Shion was incredibly strong. Shion had red eyes and white hair and because of animal blood, he had a scar too. Shion drank human blood. Shion was not dangerous or evil. Shion could love and smile goofy grins and cry and hate and experience heartbreak. Shion could have human emotions and human wants, and they could be stronger even, than his want for blood.

            “It’s poison,” Shion said, and Nezumi remembered kissing the cut on Shion’s arm, everything that happened afterward so quickly Nezumi hadn’t thought much about the reason that Shion had used his inhuman strength against him in the first place.

            It had been to wipe blood from his lips. Not blood. Poison.

            “Deadly poison?” Nezumi asked.

            “I forgot, that day,” Shion said quietly. “It could have killed you, just a drop, if you’d licked your lips, if you’d swallowed it.”

            “How did you find that out?”

            Shion shifted an inch or two back on his pillow. “Are you asking me if I’ve killed someone?”

            “Have you?”

            Shion’s expression hardened. Nezumi understood. It sounded like he was implying that Shion was a murderer just because he was a vamp. Maybe he was implying that. Nezumi wasn’t sure himself.

            “I haven’t killed anyone, Nezumi,” Shion finally said, slowly. “There are vamp forums online. That’s how I found out about the poison.”

            “I had to ask.”

            “You didn’t, actually.”

            “You’re Mr. Curiosity, you asked me everything and anything when we first met,” Nezumi reminded.

            “We didn’t just meet. You know me now. You should know the answer to that without having to ask me.”

            “You’re a vampire, Shion. I don’t care about the stereotypes. You crushed the bones of my wrist in your hand. You just admitted to having deadly poisonous blood or whatever in your veins. You were bitten when you were three years old, it’s not like you knew how to control your impulses as a three-year-old. Don’t act like I had no right to ask.”

            Shion looked at Nezumi for a long moment, then rolled over onto his other side so that his back was to Nezumi, hiked his blanket up so that it was over his ears, and just a tuft of his damp, dark hair was visible sprouting out.

            Nezumi waited a minute for Shion to stop being dramatic, and when he didn’t, Nezumi pushed himself up onto his right elbow, careful not to put any weight on his wrist and forearm. He reached out with his left hand, pulled Shion’s shoulder down to the bed so the man was on his back, tugged down Shion’s blanket to reveal his face.

            “Seriously?” he asked, and when Shion opened his eyes, they were bright, glassy.

            “You’ll always hate a part of me,” Shion whispered.

            Nezumi accidentally put weight on his wrist. Winced at the sharp pain that sprang up his arm and adjusted his position. “Shion – ”

            “I’m wearing my contacts and make-up because I know I’m a trigger of terrible memories for you, and I want to give you time to get used to me being a vamp. But I’m not ashamed of being a vamp, and I’m not trying to hide the fact that I am from you. I’m not agreeing to let you hate a part of me. I’m not okay with you never forgiving me for being a vamp. I don’t need to be forgiven. I don’t have anything to apologize for. Other than breaking your arm,” Shion added, glancing at Nezumi’s arm quickly, then looking back up at Nezumi’s face again.

            Nezumi still felt the panic he had that morning. He knew he wouldn’t sleep well that night, if he slept at all, and it was because Shion was a vamp, and it was not because of vamp stereotypes but because of Nezumi’s own life, what Nezumi had lived through.

            And he knew that Shion had nothing to do with any of it, any of Nezumi’s past, but still, Shion was getting blamed, Shion was getting punished, and Nezumi knew all of this too.

            He nodded at Shion below him. Reached up to tuck his bangs behind his ears when they fell forward, over his eyes. “I was choking you, you don’t have to apologize for breaking my arm.”

            “Then I apologize for nothing,” Shion said, and Nezumi smiled at him.

            “Okay.”

            Shion was eyeing Nezumi’s smile with suspicion. “And you can’t resent me for what I am.”

            “I won’t.”

            “And you can’t treat me like I am who I am despite being a vamp, or as some kind of exception to all vamps. I’m not an exception. The vamps who hurt you are the exception.”        

            “Okay.”

            Shion narrowed his eyes further. “And you can’t ask me things like if I’ve killed anyone with genuine curiosity like that and then try to make excuses justifying yourself for asking.”

            Nezumi nodded again. “Okay.”

            “And stop saying okay!”

            “Anything else?” Nezumi asked, while Shion narrowed his eyes at him.

            Nezumi’s arm was killing him from propping his weight on it, so he lowered himself back down to his side of the bed, turned on his side to watch Shion, who rolled over from his back as well, faced Nezumi.

            There was nearly a foot of space between them, and neither man encroached that space or said anything about it.

            “Yes, there’s something else. You can’t wear my contacts again. I need those, and you wasted a pair. More than a pair, I found a dried one on the bathroom floor just now.”

            “It folded in half when I tried to stick it in my eye,” Nezumi said, in his own defense.

            “Why were you trying to stick my contact in your eye in the first place?” Shion countered.

            “Are you going to keep talking, or are you ever going to let me sleep?” Nezumi asked back.

            “Will you be able to sleep?”

            “Not with you talking.” Nezumi closed his eyes. The panic was there, but he was getting used to it. The prickling of his skin. The turning stomach, the flashes of heat coursing through him, the quickened pulse. He knew how he would react, noted every reaction as it came as if logging items on an expected checklist.

            “I’m going to take off my contacts,” Shion said, and Nezumi nodded against his pillow.   

            He felt when Shion slipped off the bed. Listened to the sounds in the bathroom, brief, and then Shion returned, and Nezumi kept himself still while Shion settled again beside him.

            “Are you asleep?” he asked, and Nezumi almost opened his eyes just to glare at the man.

            He kept them closed. Exhaled slowly. “Seeing as it’s been about a minute, unfortunately, no.”

            “I just suddenly thought…. Do you have nightmares about me?”

            Nezumi listened to his heartbeat. The frantic thud of it in his ears, as if he’d been sprinting. His heart’s attempt to pump blood everywhere in his body as quickly as possible, to keep him alert, to keep him on his toes, to keep him prepared. Adrenaline, a survival instinct, to keep him alive.

            “I’m asleep, professor,” he said, after a minute. Shion didn’t need to know what’d been happening in his nightmares since he’d found out Shion’s secret. Shion didn’t need to know that some part of Nezumi was relieved his rampant heart would keep him awake, maybe through the night, so there might not be a chance for nightmares at all.

*

Shion reached toward the nightstand, picked up his phone to check the time. Half past two in the morning. He knew Nezumi had not fallen asleep. He could feel Nezumi’s stiffness beside him, had felt it for hours. Mostly, it was Nezumi’s breathing that he listened to. The shallow quick of it rather than the deep and soft whistles of Nezumi’s breath Shion knew to expect when he slept.

            Shion rolled onto his side to look at Nezumi, who was staring up at the ceiling, wide-eyed, jaw clenched. Shion hadn’t spoken to him since hours before, asking the man about his nightmares. Now, he didn’t speak either.

            He looked at Nezumi’s hand, fingers tightened in the bedsheet. Nezumi’s shoulders, stiff and nearly up by his ears. Nezumi’s chest, rising and falling quickly.

            He didn’t know why Nezumi was here. Why he wouldn’t leave, let them both sleep.

            Shion closed his eyes. No matter how much of the night passed them by, he doubted he would sleep until Nezumi did, until Nezumi’s shallow breaths slowed and deepened.

*

Nezumi wasn’t sure when he fell asleep, but when he did, he dreamt that he was waking.

            He was waking on Shion’s bed. There was something wrong, that prickling feeling of dread, of knowing there is danger near, and Nezumi sat up quickly, silently, found the bed empty beside him.

            He reached out to touch the empty side of the bed, but as he extended his hand, he saw that it was not in a cast. It was healed, perfect, but for a band-aid over the crease of his elbow. Nezumi was about to pull the band-aid off his skin when there was a piercing scream.

            The scream of a little girl. A scream Nezumi knew, and he shot out of bed, ran into Shion’s bathroom to see his sister sitting in the bathtub, blood-filled syringes filling the tub around her so that she was up to her waist in them, Shion crouched in front of her, talking to her softly.

            “It’s okay, Nezumi said it was okay, your big brother told me to do this,” Shion was saying, and Nezumi froze in the doorway, confused at what he’d said was okay, trying to remember.

            His sister looked up at him. Wide eyes. Tiny yellow flowers in her hair. A blurred face. He could never really remember what she looked like, even in his dreams, but this wasn’t a dream. This was real, wasn’t it? Hadn’t he just woken up? He couldn’t be dreaming if he was awake.

            His sister stared at him with terror-filled, searching eyes. Eyes like his own. He knew, though she said nothing, that she was asking him to confirm or deny Shion’s words.

            Nezumi stared at her, then at Shion again, who had turned to look at him, who smiled his goofy smile that Nezumi ached for, who said, “You don’t want me to die, right?”

            “Right,” Nezumi whispered back. He wanted to know why his sister was in Shion’s bathtub. Why there were blood-filled syringes surrounding her. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want Shion’s smile to go away. It’d been so long since he’d seen it last.

            Shion looked away from him. Reached out, touched the skin of his sister’s neck, and her eyes shut tight, her breathing was quick, a whimper fell from her lips, a tiny sound that doused Nezumi in ice, that froze him in the doorway.

            “Don’t worry. Your big brother wants this, and he knows what’s best,” Shion was saying, but his voice wasn’t his own, and when he leaned forward, his dark hair turned white, and when he opened his mouth, his lips curled up, his teeth were fangs, and then he moved his fingers from Nezumi’s sister’s neck, replaced them with his teeth.

            Nezumi’s sister screamed, a scream Nezumi had heard before, a scream he knew better than even the sound of his own heartbeat, and he tried to run to her, but there were hands on his arms, holding him back, shaking him –

            “Nezumi!”

*

_“Nezumi!”_

            Nezumi’s eyes snapped open. Shion felt no relief that the man had finally woken from his nightmare, as a moment later, Nezumi lunged, and Shion was pinned underneath him.

            Nezumi’s face was wet from sweat. His dark hair stuck to his cheeks, fell forward in a curtain of limp night sky that tickled Shion’s own skin. His silver eyes were fully dilated, pupils dark and stretched nearly to the outer edges of his irises so that the ring of silver was hardly visible. They were wide and wet, and when he blinked, water dripped from his long eyelashes. A tear fell into Shion’s parted lips.

            His hand was on Shion’s throat, but his grip was loose. He looked like he might collapse over Shion.

            “I’ll kill you,” he breathed.

            “It was a nightmare,” Shion said back, trying to speak calmly, feeling Nezumi’s hand tighten around his throat. It was his left hand, the right one in its cast pinning Shion’s shoulder to the mattress.

            Nezumi shook his head. Nails dug into Shion’s neck. Shion took a deep breath, and then Nezumi’s hand tightened to the point that he couldn’t breathe at all.

            “I didn’t choose you over her, I’d never – I – ”

            Nezumi’s tears spotted Shion’s cheeks, fell into his mouth while Shion tried to suck in air. They were salty and hot, slid over Shion’s tongue down his throat. Shion tried to think while he still had the oxygen to do so. He didn’t want to hurt Nezumi a second time, he didn’t want to break Nezumi’s other arm, he didn’t want to use his vamp strength against Nezumi ever again.

            “You’ll never replace them,” Nezumi hissed, the anger and the urgency diluted by the shake of his voice, the break in it. “I’d never sacrifice – I wouldn’t – ”

            Shion worried his windpipe would be flattened, would snap under Nezumi’s weight, crushing it. He reached up, pulled at Nezumi’s fingers that were around his throat, tried to rein in his vamp strength so he wouldn’t snap each of Nezumi’s fingers into shattered fragments of bone, tried to focus on just freeing himself from Nezumi’s grip, but it was so hard to focus when he couldn’t breathe at all.

            Shion felt his eyes close. Felt his consciousness slipping from him. He’d lose control. He’d instinctively give in to his vamp strength. He’d break Nezumi’s hand, or worse.

            There was nothing he could do to stop himself. He was a vamp, but he was not wired to hurt, he was not wired to kill.

            But if his life was in danger, Shion was wired to survive.

*

The moment the red eyes fluttered closed, Nezumi felt weak. Drained. Stared at Shion’s face and clarity flooded him in a dizzying, overwhelming way as he recognized Shion not as the vampire of his nightmare, but as the man he knew, the professor, stupid grins and a loud laugh, soft lips and deep kisses and a voice that broke over the syllables of his name when he climaxed.

            Nezumi’s grip loosened just as Shion’s fingers tightened around his hand. Nezumi knew what would happen next, felt alarm in new wave of panic, shouted – “Professor, stop!”

            He felt the squeeze of his bones, a sharp pain slipping all the way up his arm like lightning. He waited to hear the cracks, for Shion to crush his left hand the way he had his right a month before, but at his shout, Shion’s fingers fell from his hand, and then Shion was gasping in air, and his eyes were opening, and Nezumi leaned back, clambered off the man’s body that he’d been straddling, gathered himself on his side of the bed, so close to the edge he was nearly falling off of it.

            He curled his fingers into a loose fist and stretched them again. They were sore, but not broken. He pushed his hair off his face where it stuck, felt that his face was wet and lifted his t-shirt to wipe it. When he pulled the fabric down from his face, Shion was sitting up, a hand around his throat, still gasping loudly.

            When he looked at Nezumi, his red eyes were bright. Nezumi gripped the bedsheets to keep himself from flinching back, from falling off the edge of the bed to get away from him.

            “Did I break it?” Shion asked, voice hoarse, eyes falling to Nezumi’s hand around the bedsheets. The sheets were damp, Nezumi guessed from his own sweat.

            “No.”

            Shion exhaled deeply. Relieved, even though Nezumi had just tried to kill him.

            “Was it your sister or your mother?” Shion asked, after clearing his throat, and Nezumi felt his heart stop, then start again, just as quickly as before. “You were yelling a lot before I woke you up,” Shion added quietly, while Nezumi stared resolutely at his fisted fingers in the bedsheet.

            “I don’t remember,” Nezumi lied.

            In the silence, Nezumi heard nothing but his pulse and Shion’s labored breaths. It was a full minute before Nezumi realized it wasn’t Shion who was still gasping so loudly. It out Nezumi’s own lips that the exhales tugged out of, it was into Nezumi’s own lungs that he desperately pulled air.

            He clamped his mouth shut. His gasps only seemed louder streaming through his nose.

            “We can’t do this. You can’t sleep here again. I could have really hurt you. More than just your hand.”

            Nezumi stopped staring at the bedsheets. “It’s me you’re worried about? I tried to kill you because of a nightmare.”

            “You can’t kill me,” Shion said simply, not seeming concerned even though across his neck there was a red handprint, even though the red would darken over the days and the skin would be bruised there, just as it should have been before, and Nezumi narrowed his eyes in confusion for a moment, wondering why he hadn’t seen the bruises.

            He hadn’t come near Shion for a month after the last time he’d strangled the man, but he’d watched Shion from a distance.

            Make-up. _Warm Silk_ or _Ghost Kiss._ Nezumi felt his shoulders drop at the realization. He wondered if Shion’s mother had even known what Nezumi had done to her son. He wondered if Safu knew.

            “You’re not unbreakable, Shion. Vamp Hunters kill vamps all the time.”

            “Not through brute force. Through injections or with weapons that they can fire from afar. Anything you try to do to me, if you’re close enough that I can fight back, then my vamp strength will stop you. I can’t push it down, I can’t rein it in, I can’t do anything once I’m really in danger.”

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. “And it doesn’t bother you at all that, despite the apparent futility of my efforts, I just tried to kill you.”

            “You were half asleep. You weren’t aware of your actions. Just like I’m not aware of what I do when my vamp strength comes out without my permission, you weren’t aware of what you were doing to me.”

            “I hardly think that’s a fair comparison. You should hold me accountable for my actions.”

            “What do you want me to do then? Be scared of you? I’m not,” Shion shot back. “You have to take care of yourself around me. I told you I’d never hurt you, but I wasn’t thinking about this. You act against your own knowledge in your nightmares, just as I do when my life is at risk. So long as your nightmares are about me, it’s not safe for you to sleep here.”

            Nezumi did not tell Shion that one of the best parts of him was not having to sleep alone anymore. Was having someone there when he woke from a nightmare. Was the comfort of another human, not something Nezumi had ever known.

            But Shion wasn’t human. How could he comfort Nezumi from his nightmares when he was the nightmare?

            “I hate it too,” Shion said quietly. “I didn’t think of this. I didn’t consider we couldn’t sleep together. But maybe that will change too. Maybe in time…” Shion didn’t sound convinced.

            Nezumi pulled his legs to his chest. Pressed his forehead into them. He was still breathing too quickly. He was exhausted. Had spent the entire day with Shion the day before, and for his body to be on high alert for such a long period had drained him, to have his heart beating so quickly all day and all night and now – he wondered if it’d just give out completely.

            He couldn’t have this conversation now, he couldn’t think about anything else that was impossible with having a relationship with Shion.

            “You should go home, Nezumi,” Shion said gently. “You should get some real sleep, you were up nearly all night.”

            If Shion knew that, that meant he’d been up nearly all night as well, but Nezumi didn’t say this.

            He unraveled himself. Sat up and stood from the bed. Pulled on his jeans from where they were folded on Shion’s floor. He had a few articles of his own clothing at Shion’s apartment. His lease expired in September and before everything, before finding out the truth, he’d thought about mentioning this to Shion. He could move here. Better yet, they could get an apartment that wasn’t small and shitty like Shion’s, but was still closer to the bakery than Nezumi’s. Maybe in Safu’s building. He’d already called Safu’s landlord. He’d already found out about two open units. He’d already toured them, asked about water and heating and garbage disposal and casually asked Safu things like how reliable the landlord was, whether the controlled rent was an empty promise or if it really hadn’t risen in the last five years.

            And then he’d found out Shion was a vamp. And everything had changed. And even though they were supposed to be going back to normalcy now, Nezumi knew they couldn’t.

            He’d never have what he’d wanted, what he’d let himself want for a split second. He could never have a life with Shion, and to act like he could, to keep trying this, to say they’d take it slow and make it work – it was a lie just like Shion being human had been a lie.

            Nezumi stuck his feet in his boots and left Shion’s apartment, not bothering to look back at the bed, at Shion sitting there, at the marks on his neck, the bruise that would bloom there, that Shion would hide with his make-up so that he could pretend, just like he always pretended, that he actually had a chance at normal, lasting, human happiness with Nezumi, and Nezumi with him.

*

When Nezumi left, Shion knew he should try to sleep more – he’d only gotten about an hour before Nezumi started yelling – but he knew also that the effort would be pointless. He got up, took a cold shower, washed off his foundation. When he got out of the shower, he stood dripping wet in front of his mirror, looked at his red eyes, his scar. The image of Nezumi’s nightmares.

            Shion dried himself roughly, still damp when he dressed and went to his kitchen, crouched down and reached into the back of his cupboard to retrieve his oatmeal can. He took out the beaker of Nezumi’s blood.

            Two hundred milliliters left. Shion poured fifty milliliters carefully into another beaker, covered the bigger one and replaced it in its oatmeal can and the can in the cupboard, before standing up again, looking at his food for the day.

            He should have taken less. At fifty milliliters a day, he’d have three more days of food after this.

            He pressed the cool side of the beaker to his lips, tilted it, drank slowly. He liked the taste of Nezumi, a new taste, like discovering a new food. When he ordered blood online, he could taste that it was diluted, the flavor stale, nothing to savor. Safu’s and his mother’s blood had strong tastes, undiluted, satisfying but no longer delicious. He was used to it. Tired of the taste of them, a worn taste, too familiar to be special.

            Nezumi was new. Tasted like he smelled, earthy and incredible, and when Shion closed his eyes, he could see Nezumi as he drank, could feel warmth along his skin, could feel the energy being around Nezumi gave him, a little giddiness, a little contentment, a little lust.

            The beaker was empty too quickly. Shion felt a warm heaviness inside him, a satisfaction of eating, even though it wasn’t enough. He washed out the beaker, then returned to bed even though it was seven in the morning, feeling weighted down by the blood.

            When he closed his eyes, Shion wondered if he would have his own nightmare, the one he’d had for the first time the night before, after he’d first tasted Nezumi’s blood.

            The one where he was kissing Nezumi in this very bed, the one where his lips had trickled down Nezumi’s cheek and around his jaw, the one where he’d pressed a single kiss to the soft underside of Nezumi’s throat, thin flesh above the jugular, the one where he’d bitten down on Nezumi’s skin, thinking only of giving the man a hickey, a normal thing to do, sexy, playful, to make Nezumi feel good, completely selfless.

            In Shion’s nightmare, the thick of Nezumi’s flesh between his teeth had been unexpectedly satisfying, supple but surprisingly unyielding at the same time, not quite rubbery but similar to that texture, pliant, elastic, challenging to break but Shion knew, if he wanted, the skin would give instantly to the will of his teeth.

            In Shion’s nightmare, he’d bitten down harder, tested the durability of the skin, Nezumi moaning on the bed below him, a sound of pleasure, Shion was certain, pleasure Shion felt in tandem when he broke the skin, when his mouth filled with blood. Just a trickle at first, a luscious taste, incredible and warm and the consistency of heavy syrup, exquisite. He drank and it came eagerly to his lips and then he didn’t stop drinking until, lips flush against Nezumi’s neck, mouth warm and wet, there was nothing left to drink. Nezumi was empty, and when Shion sat up, looked down at the man beneath him and licked his lips, Nezumi was dead.

            Now, Shion closed his eyes. Hoped desperately he wouldn’t have the nightmare again, that it wouldn’t become recurring, that soon, he could forget it had even happened, that he’d even entertained such thoughts in his subconscious.

            Shion hoped also – with just the smallest part of him, a part he could ignore, a part he would deny, a part he could easily pretend did not exist at all – that he’d have the nightmare again. Just to taste Nezumi once more, just to drink straight from his veins, Nezumi’s warm, smooth skin against his lips, so so so much blood – in Shion’s unconscious fantasy, he’d felt no obligation to ration this blood, no obligation to stop, no obligation to let the man he loved live.

*


	17. Chapter 17

An hour after Nezumi left Shion’s apartment, he had crew rehearsal. After barely sleeping all night, and sleeping terribly when he had, Nezumi should have skipped rehearsal, but he’d skipped rehearsal on Friday and Saturday, and Sunday morning as he walked out of Shion’s apartment building, his phone blipped with a text message from Kage that read simply –

            _If you don’t come in today, don’t bother stepping foot in my theater ever again._

            Nezumi had received threats from his manager, but not like this. Not concise, calm, texted instead of left in a shouted voicemail.

            So Nezumi stopped at his own apartment only to shower, and got to the theater ten minutes before crew rehearsal started.

            Many of the cast was already on stage, walking around with their script books, talking to themselves as they rehearsed lines individually before the whole cast rehearsal would start. Nezumi saw his understudy – though now, of course, he was _her_ understudy – chewing on the top of a pen as she studied her script.

            Nezumi ignored the urge to join the cast, where he belonged. He walked past the stage, to the backstage, and down the hall coming towards him was the manager himself.

            “I’m here,” Nezumi offered.

            “Want a medal?” Kage asked back.

            Nezumi stepped to the side so his manager could walk past him, but after Kage passed him one step, he stopped, turned back.

            “No scathing retort?” Kage asked, looking suspicious.

            Nezumi pulled his hair up into a bun. His arm hurt, but it always hurt. As of today, it was a month exactly since it’d been broken, but Nezumi wasn’t entirely sure that it was healing inside his cast. He felt as if the bones were only breaking more, the fractures stretching past his wrist, up to his elbow, farther along his upper arm, reaching his shoulder and spiderwebbing out to his entire skeleton so that at any moment he might just crumble completely, the bones inside him turned to ash. 

            “You want to tell me why you weren’t here the past two days?” Kage asked, eyes skimming over Nezumi’s face. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded concerned, and that was worse.

            “No.” For the first time in over twenty-four hours, Nezumi’s heart was not beating too fast. He felt no adrenaline in his body at all. His heart felt too slow, now, as if it had forgotten it’s normal rhythm after racing for a full day and night, as if it was overcompensating, thudding sluggishly now to make up for speeding before. But it felt too slow, close to stopping, ceasing altogether.

            “You look like something terrible’s happened to you,” Kage said.

            Nezumi had nothing to say to this. It was a good thing, that he was trying to be with Shion again. That was supposed to be a good thing. That was supposed to be what he wanted.

            Kage looked as if he was going to walk away, but his eyes caught on Nezumi’s arm, and then he was grabbing Nezumi’s cast, pulling his wrist forward.

            “Ah, shit, that’s broken, you know,” Nezumi muttered, pain thrilling up his arm.

            Kage’s fingers pressed against the inside of his elbow. “Are you on goddamn drugs?”

            Nezumi jerked free his arm. Held it to his chest. “No.”

            “Get off them, or you’re done here. I’m serious, Nezumi, these aren’t empty threats. You’re useless to me if you’re on drugs. You’re already off the play, and I’m keeping you here as a courtesy to you, to the amazing eleven years you’ve given me at this theater. You know my policy, you know this isn’t acceptable.”

            “I’m not on drugs,” Nezumi said. He already knew what his arm looked like, the marks from Safu’s syringe.

            “Yeah? Why don’t you get Misaki to cover the drugged-out look on your face and the track marks around your veins before the next time you try that lie? Might be more successful then,” Kage snapped, then stomped away, shouting to the cast as he went that they’d better be in their positions before he was even in sight of the stage.

            Nezumi ducked into his dressing room, looked in the mirror to see what “drugged-out look” his manager had been talking about. He looked exhausted, more than anything. Worn, his skin sallow. He was poking the bags under his eyes when there was a knock on the doorframe.

            “Hey, running crew kicked you out of their posse, said they can’t afford to deal with your new unreliable kick. But no worries, I’ve taken you under my wing, so the manager won’t fire you as long as he doesn’t find out about this. You can thank me later. Right now, come up, I’ll show you the ropes.”

            Nezumi glanced at Shunsuke in his doorway. He felt no panic at the sight of Shunsuke. His heart didn’t quicken, his skin didn’t sweat, his throat didn’t tighten, his stomach didn’t turn.

            He didn’t feel anything at all.

            Nezumi followed Shunsuke up the stairs to the upper deck, let Shunsuke introduce him to the rest of the lighting crew – for Nezumi’s sake, he knew, as the crew knew him already.

            After introductions, Shunsuke led him to the operating table, was pointing out what levers on the switchboard controlled what lights, and Nezumi interrupted him.

            “Why are you helping me?”

            Shunsuke stopped midsentence. “Well, I’m assuming you’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of lighting crew, and if I’m being honest, no one else on the crew really supported me helping you. The manager’s been in a state since you’ve been going off the rails, and he’s taking it out on everyone else since, well, since you’re not around for him to yell at you. You’ve fallen out of good favor with most of the cast and crew.”

            “I mean – Why are you helping me at all? Not with lighting crew. With keeping this job. Just let Kage fire me.”

            Shunsuke tilted his head. “You want to be fired?”

            Nezumi dragged his hand over his face. “No.”

            “Then why are you asking me a stupid question? Pay attention, I’m going to quiz you on this switchboard later,” Shunsuke replied easily.

            Nezumi tried to pay attention. Tried to think about switchboards instead of the increasing pain in his arm. Instead of Shion and the fact that they couldn’t even spend nights together. They couldn’t even kiss. They couldn’t even be in the same room.

            Nezumi wanted to believe he just needed time. But for the first time in a full day and a full night, he didn’t feel scared out of his mind. He felt tired, and he felt numb, and his arm hurt, but he wasn’t terrified. Really, more than anything else, Nezumi felt relieved.

            He was relieved to have a break from his own panic. He was relieved to be away from Shion. He was relieved to be free from the presence of a vampire.

            Everything he’d said to Shion, wanting a life with him, loving him, needing him over the life he’d lived before – it was still true, it was all real, Nezumi would say it again if he had to, would fight for Shion to give them a chance again and again.

            But his relief was true too, and real too, and Nezumi didn’t know what to do with that, how to ignore that, how to understand that.

            “Hey, what did I just say that switch was for?” Shunsuke asked, snapping his fingers in front of Nezumi’s face.

            Nezumi glanced at the switch Shunsuke pointed to. “Lights,” he finally said.

            “Listen, I think you’re cute, Nezumi, but the manager won’t, and he’ll fire my ass on top of yours for letting you waste company time. Seriously, pay attention this time, I’ll go over it once more.”

            Nezumi watched Shunsuke point to switches, listened to him talk about lights, strip lights and scoop lights and house lights and worklights and spotlights and beam projectors and Fresnel lanterns and followspots. He memorized all of it and tried to tune out the sounds of the cast rehearsing on the stage below him, where he was supposed to be. Or at least, where he used to belong when things still made sense.

*

When the kitchen door swung open an hour before close on Sunday afternoon, Shion thought it would be Safu.

            “You’re just in time, I just finished a batch of banana walnut muffins, I was going to bring them over your place, but – ” Shion stopped speaking on seeing it was not Safu at the door.

            “You forgot an oven mitt,” Nezumi pointed out, and Shion set the muffin tray carefully on the counter.

            “Vamp thing,” he said, after a moment.

            “Can’t be burned. Yeah, I know about that one,” Nezumi replied, walking into the kitchen, going to the sink. “Surprised you’re baking anything, the bakery is about to close.”

            “They’re for Safu, not the customers. Her favorites.”

            Nezumi hummed as he washed his hands. Shion watched the back of him. He hadn’t expected to see Nezumi so soon after that morning.

            “How was your day?” Shion asked, watching Nezumi leave the sink, start gathering ingredients for the banana walnut muffins Shion had left out and packing them away.

            “Wonderful. Yours?”

            “Did you have work?”

            Nezumi nodded, folding over the opened bag of walnuts and clipping it closed.

            “I never asked you. What role did you get in _Hamlet?_ Ophelia?”

            Nezumi put the nuts away silently, and the bag of flour, and the sugar, and looked up at Shion for just a second before he was gathering the emptied mixing bowls and whisks and spoons.

            “Understudy,” he said, voice hardly any louder than the jumble of dishware that clanked in the largest mixing bowl Nezumi carried to the sink.

            “What?” Shion asked, pausing in placing the muffins on the cooling rack. “You’re an understudy? You said the audition went well.”

            “It did.” Nezumi turned on the sink. Shion watched the movements of his shoulder blades as he started doing the dishes. Shion doubted he was allowed to get his cast wet, but Nezumi didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

            “Then why were you cast as an understudy? You’re the best actor at that theater.”

            “I wasn’t cast as an understudy. I was cast as Ophelia, and then I fucked up during rehearsal for a week, and then I became an understudy. In the meantime, I’m on crew.”

            “Stage crew?”

            “Lights.”

            Shion didn’t look away from Nezumi’s back as he finished the dishes. When Nezumi was done, he wet a washcloth, wrung it dry, then turned off the faucet and started wiping down counters.

            It wasn’t hard to put together. “You messed up during rehearsal after you found out I was a vamp.”

            “It’s my own fault, not yours, don’t try to take the credit for everything, professor.”

            “I’m not trying to – You didn’t even tell me.”

            “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” Nezumi looked tired. He wiped the counters slowly with his left hand, his right bent against his chest. Shion had no idea why the doctor hadn’t given Nezumi a sling. His arm needed to be consistently elevated to heal properly.

            Shion resumed placing muffins on the cooling rack. When he finished, he swept the kitchen, and Karan came to the back, told them she’d locked up, so they went to the front room, wiped the tables and placed chairs on top of them and Shion swept while Nezumi counted out the cash register.

            Shion finished sweeping while Nezumi was ripping open a roll of quarters. Shion leaned against the other side of the register where the customers waited in line, and when Nezumi noticed him, he jerked back and dropped a handful of quarters. They scattered all over the floor. Nezumi ducked down to collect the ones that had fallen while Shion gathered those that were rolling along the counter.

            “I didn’t think I’d see you this afternoon,” Shion said, pretending the dropped quarters had merely been a result of clumsiness rather than fear after Nezumi stood up again, poured quarters into the register and closed the drawer.

            “I won’t come home with you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I learned my lesson.”

            “I’m not worried about that. I just thought you’d want…a break. From being around me.”

            “I was at rehearsal all morning.”

            “A longer break than a few hours.”

            “Do you not want me to be here?”

            “Do you want to be here?” Shion countered.

            Nezumi rubbed the back of his neck. Exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. I’m tired of thinking about it.”

            Shion tightened his hand around the broom. Didn’t press Nezumi, left the counter to put the broom back in the cleaning closet, stopped at the kitchen to transfer Safu’s muffins from the cooling rack to a box, and came back to the front just as Nezumi was walking out from around the counter.

            “Ready?” he asked, getting the lights.

            Shion followed him out of the bakery. Held the box of muffins against his hip as he locked it. Looked at Nezumi and didn’t know what to say to him, but Nezumi didn’t wait for him to say anything.

            He had reached out with his left hand, caught Shion’s hand – the one free from the muffin box – and pulled it toward him.

            Shion was silent, let Nezumi’s fingers – those of his left hand clumsy already, and trembling against Shion’s skin – unravel Shion’s own fingers, free his palm.

            Nezumi bowed his head. His bangs fell forward, shielded his expression, so Shion couldn’t see what Nezumi might be thinking as he lifted Shion’s palm to his lips.

            The kiss was warm, pressed into the center of Shion’s palm like momentary sunlight, and then Nezumi released Shion’s hand. 

            Shion wrapped his fingers into his palm immediately to hold the feeling of Nezumi’s lips there. He stared at Nezumi, breathless, and Nezumi looked at him for a long moment, as if Shion was the one who needed to offer an explanation.

            Shion had no explanation. He couldn’t imagine why Nezumi had kissed his palm. He couldn’t imagine why such a simple thing had his pulse scattered.

            Nezumi licked his lips. His eyes were wide when he tucked his bangs behind his ears. “If we’re going to do this slowly, we have to start somewhere,” he said, finally.

            Shion nodded as if this made sense. As if this was logical, to start with a kiss on the palm.

            “Good night, professor,” Nezumi said quietly, and then he stepped back from Shion, turned around, walked away from him to the direction of the subway.

            Shion watched him walk away and wondered where Nezumi might kiss him the next day.

*

When Nezumi got to his apartment, he searched for his painkillers. Found them under a pile of clothes, pried open the bottle with more difficulty than he felt was necessary, and popped three pills, then took a fourth. He read the label only afterward – _Take one at a time, two if pain persists._

            Nezumi’s pain had persisted. For his entire life, his pain had persisted. Four, if anything, seemed moderate.

*

On Monday, Nezumi kissed the inside of Shion’s wrist outside the closed bakery doors.

            On Tuesday, he kissed Shion by the counter, not his forearm as Shion had been anticipating from the loose pattern established by the two previous kisses, but Shion’s cheek, crouching down and tilting Shion’s face toward him while Shion had been kneeling on the floor, erasing that day’s specials from Karan’s tiny folding chalkboard that stood outside the bakery.

            On Wednesday, Shion hoped Nezumi might kiss his lips – a logical step from the cheek –  but the man instead walked behind Shion while he washed the last of the dishes, shifted the strip of Shion’s apron that looped over his neck, kissed the nape of Shion’s neck, the top pebble of his spine, before stepping away again to finish wiping down the counters, saying nothing.

            On Thursday, Nezumi didn’t show up at the bakery at all, but Shion knew to expect this after getting a text from Nezumi –

            _Held up at crew today, won’t be at Karan’s._

            Shion was in his apartment on Thursday night, brushing his teeth when there was a knock on the door, and Shion went to answer it, thinking it might be the pizza delivery girl coming to the wrong apartment again as she had for the previous three deliveries that had been meant for Shion’s neighbor.

            Instead, at the door was Nezumi.

            Shion took his toothbrush out his mouth and held it up, unsure what to do with it.

            “You can’t really have come all the way over here just to – ”

            Shion shut up when Nezumi leaned forward, wordlessly. His forefinger and thumb cupped Shion’s chin, tilting Shion’s head to the side. Shion felt the man’s lips press carefully to his jawbone, the very corner of it, right where it curved up to his ear, linger there for a full three seconds that Shion counted in his head before leaving his skin.

            “Don’t forget to floss,” Nezumi said softly, letting go of Shion’s chin, reaching out for the doorknob, and closing Shion’s own apartment door on him.

            Shion listened to Nezumi’s footsteps retreat down his apartment hallway. Nezumi’s fingers on his chin had been shaking, and his eyes had still had that wide, fearful look that they always did around him now.

            But Shion thought, maybe, Nezumi’s fingers hadn’t shaken _as_ badly. And he’d thought, maybe, Nezumi’s eyes hadn’t been _as_ wide. And he wondered, possibly, if taking it slowly – as slowly as this, as insanely as this – was working.

*

Nezumi only took pain pills when he wasn’t around Shion. He didn’t want the effect of the pills to trick him into thinking the panic was wearing off when it wasn’t.

            So when he suspected the panic actually was lessening, he knew objectively that it couldn’t be because of the pills, and even so, Nezumi looked at the bottle suspiciously, read the label several times, and then Googled the medication. Nezumi had never trusted pills. He had no idea why he’d started taking them. There were countless side effects listed online, and Nezumi promptly flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet, then regretted this. He probably could have sold them to some idiot.

            It had been two weeks since he’d donated blood to Shion, since he’d started seeing Shion again. It was Friday night, and when Nezumi went to Shion’s apartment after rehearsal – he’d had to stay at the theater too late again to help close the bakery – Shion opened his door, and Nezumi had planned on kissing the man’s left cheekbone, but before he could, Shion held out a hand.

            “Wait, before you, you know, kiss me and leave, I just want to tell you. I finished the last of your blood today. I started drinking just ten milliliters a day, trying to stretch it, and this morning, I drank the rest of it. I wanted to tell you. So you’re prepared.”

            Nezumi forgot about Shion’s left cheekbone. “Prepared for you to start starving again?”

            “I don’t really have another choice.”

            “I’ll give you more of my blood, I’ll have Safu take it tonight.” Nezumi didn’t have to think about it. Wasn’t thinking about it at all. He was logging his reactions as he’d taken to doing around Shion.

            His heart was faster, but not frantic. His stomach clenched, but not in a nauseous way, nervous, more than anything. His skin was hot, but that could have been the early August night, the walk from the subway station. It wasn’t difficult to breathe at all.

            “We can’t talk about this out here in the hallway. Do you want to come in, or I could call you – ”

            Nezumi walked past Shion, into his apartment. When Shion closed the door, Nezumi noted his pulse – a little louder in his ears. Nothing like it had been two weeks before. Manageable. Easily ignorable.

            “You can’t donate any sooner than every eight weeks. The body has on average eight to twelve pints of blood. You just gave a full pint two weeks ago. Your body needs to recover those lost cells.”

            “Yeah, yeah, I read about it, I get it.”

            “You read about blood donation?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi walked around Shion’s apartment. Drifted to Shion’s small dresser, opened the drawer that held his small assortment of clothes, flipped through his own shirts Shion was basically keeping hostage, closed the drawer again without taking any of his shirts back.

            “I’m not okay with you just starving for the next six weeks.”

            “My mom and Safu can donate in four weeks.”

            “That’s a full month.”

            “I’m used to it.”

            “You barely made it the last full month. What’s the longest you’ve gone without food? Was it last time, before my blood?”

            _How long will it take you to starve to death?_ Nezumi wondered if he could ask Shion this question. Shion might be less emotional about it than Safu. Shion might give an answer.

            “No, but it was close. The longest was thirty-three days, when I was eight. That’s when I drank animal blood. That’s when I got my scar.”

            Shion’s scar was covered up now. It always was. Nezumi hadn’t seen the red eyes or the scar since he’d slept in Shion’s bed two weeks before, since he’d woken and tried to strangle Shion.

            “So roughly a month. And you want to push yourself to do that again.”

            “I don’t want to, Nezumi. None of this is what I want.”

            Nezumi didn’t reply to this. He’d researched. Read about the alternative ways vamps got blood. Stole from hospitals and blood banks with blood meant only for humans. Committed nonconsensual bleedings, when they ambushed humans in alleys or dark-lit streets or empty office buildings or elevators or just in broad daylight, in public, pulled blood from these humans with syringes, then ran.

            Shion would never approve of any of these methods.

            “Nezumi, you can’t do anything stupid. I don’t want you giving blood, okay? You’ve already got a serious injury, you shouldn’t be donating blood at all in the first place, especially not two weeks after a full donation. Do you understand?”

            Nezumi crossed the apartment again. It was late, he’d let Shion sleep. Sleep was important for energy, and Shion would need energy if he wasn’t going to have food. He was already running on just ten milliliters a day. That was too little. A fraction of what he needed. He was already starving himself.

            Shion stepped in front of the closed door. “I don’t want to trap you in here, but I need you to tell me you understand before you go. I need you to promise me you won’t draw any blood before eight weeks are up.”

            “I promise,” Nezumi said easily.

            Shion’s eyes narrowed. Looking at him carefully, Nezumi could see signs of starvation. His cheekbones were sharper. His cheeks were hollower. His skin was sallower. Nezumi should have noticed before. Had been too preoccupied with his own problems, with his own fear and panic and trying to turn that all off that he hadn’t even looked at Shion properly in two weeks.

            “You don’t trust me, professor?”

            Shion scrutinized him for another moment, then stepped sideways away from the door, and Nezumi opened it, let himself out.

            He almost started walking down the hall to leave the apartment building when Shion spoke behind him.

            “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi turned around. He’d planned on kissing Shion’s left cheekbone, but looking at it, the sharpness of it, too sharp against his thin skin, Nezumi changed his mind. Leaned closer and kissed Shion’s lips, meant to listen to his pulse as he did so, to measure it as he had been doing, but Nezumi didn’t really give a damn about his pulse at that moment.

            Shion’s mouth was soft and familiar in an aching way. Nezumi didn’t pull away. Opened his lips slightly, kissed Shion properly, not a peck, not a fleeting kiss, not something that would dissolve from their skin a minute later.

            Shion exhaled deeply into Nezumi’s mouth. His own lips opened. He leaned forward, and Nezumi heard his pulse in his ears now, the thud of it, persistent, not ignorable.

            Nezumi pulled away. “I almost forgot.” He wanted to kiss the man longer. Do so much more than kiss him. He hated his own body, his adrenaline and survival instincts losing their shit around this man who’d never hurt him – Nezumi knew that now, didn’t trust all vamps but he trusted this one, he was crazy about this one, why didn’t his reflexes give a damn about that?

            Shion touched his lips. “Don’t break your promise,” he said, and Nezumi let himself look at Shion a moment longer, then left him in his doorway, stood in Shion’s elevator and listened to his pulse gradually slow. He no longer felt relief when he was away from Shion. Calmer, maybe, but Nezumi had no real desire for calm.

            When he was out of the elevator, he pulled out his phone. Googled local hospitals and blood banks, just to find the closest ones. Just for the sake of research.

*

Shion looked up from his laptop to peer across the table at Nezumi, who was eating a slice of pie and reading _The Count of Monte Cristo._

            Shion had run out of blood two weeks before. A distraction from his hunger had come in the form of preparing for the fall semester – it was Friday, and his classes started up again on Monday. They’d just closed up the bakery, but Shion didn’t want to go home for the night because that meant Nezumi would go home separately. So Shion had brought his laptop with him, had stopped at the library to check out _The Count of Monte Cristo_ that Nezumi had once mentioned in conversation, had made a pumpkin pie – Nezumi’s favorite – to casually entice him to stay as well.

            Shion’s plan had worked – when he’d informed Nezumi his apartment wifi had been spotty, that he’d be working a little from the bakery before going home after close, Nezumi hadn’t questioned it, likely because Shion’s wifi often was spotty. And when Shion had pulled the pie he’d made out the oven and mused aloud on how silly he’d been, making pie right before closing when there was no one to eat it fresh out the oven, Nezumi had perked up, suggested he could do with a slice. And when Nezumi had sat with his pie at a table by the front window of the bakery and Shion had pulled his laptop out the backpack he’d brought, he’d exclaimed in remorse that he’d forgotten to return _The Count of Monte Cristo_ to the library again, complained mildly that he’d get a late fine soon enough, while Nezumi had put down his fork to take the book from Shion’s hand, to open it without a word and start reading.

            Shion had meant to be proofreading the syllabus he’d finally updated for his Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture course, but he kept peeking up above his laptop screen to watch Nezumi instead.

            The sun was setting outside the glassfront of the bakery, and brilliant afternoon sunlight was tossed over Nezumi, lighting his dark hair, casting shadows over his skin where features of his face blocked the light – his nose, his eyelashes, his lips.

            Shion had seen increasingly more of Nezumi in the past two weeks, since Nezumi had finally kissed him on the lips again, fully and completely but much too quickly, at Shion’s doorway the day Shion had drank the last of Nezumi’s blood. Nezumi had kissed Shion on the lips again, even more fully, even more completely, for longer portions of time, since then.

            Like in the bakery just as the timer went off and Shion had a window of approximately five seconds to grab the soufflés from the oven lest they burn, Nezumi might pull his wrist and kiss him for much too long, and Shion would let the soufflés burn without a regret.

            Like beside the register, when Shion was counting bills, Nezumi might kiss him to make him forget his count, to kiss him again the moment Shion was nearly done counting after a second attempt, to kiss him again when Shion was nearly through his third attempt.

            Like washing dishes at the sink, Nezumi might kiss Shion when his hands were full of suds. Like chopping walnuts, Nezumi might kiss Shion so abruptly that he’d nearly chop off his own thumb. Like pouring chocolate chips into cookie dough, Nezumi might kiss Shion so he’d accidentally overturn the entire chocolate chip bag into the bowl when the recipe called for only half.

            Shion was getting used to being kissed by Nezumi now. It wasn’t as it had been before – Nezumi’s kisses had an expiration point now, and he’d pull away just when Shion was ready to reach for him, to wrap his fingers in Nezumi’s hair or push his hands up Nezumi’s shirt or pull Nezumi closer by his belt loops.

            Nezumi’s kisses, also, were restricted to the bakery. He hadn’t returned to Shion’s apartment, unless it was to knock on Shion’s door at unexpected times and kiss him in the doorway before leaving again, without a word, without any other purpose but to leave Shion wanting more.

            Nezumi was wary, and Shion was as well. A part of Nezumi, Shion knew, would always be hesitant to kiss a vamp, to want a vamp, to love a vamp, but that part was getting smaller each day, and Shion felt it in the way Nezumi kissed him longer, kissed him deeper, touched him sometimes when he kissed him – though Shion was never allowed to touch back – a hand settling on Shion’s waist or drifting up the nape of Shion’s neck or stringing slightly into Shion’s hair or tilting up Shion’s chin or skimming Shion’s jawline or sliding around Shion’s lower back.

            “I know you’re staring at me,” Nezumi said, not looking up from the pages of _Monte Cristo_.

            “I’m not trying to hide it,” Shion replied.

            Nezumi made a soft scoffing sound with his exhale, but Shion still saw when Nezumi’s lips turned up just slightly as he flipped to the next page.

            “I can’t concentrate,” Shion admitted.

            “I’m sure you’re just not trying hard enough.”

            “My syllabus is probably fine as it is. It’s the same one I’ve used before, just tweaked a little bit.”

            Nezumi hummed. His cheek rested on his palm – the left one. He still had a cast on his right arm, even though it’d been nearly two full months since Shion had broken it. It was now the end of August, and Nezumi had known Shion was a vamp since the end of June. For nearly all of July, Nezumi had stayed away from him, but to Shion, that time had felt as if it’d spanned not a month but several years.

            And since Shion had been back together with Nezumi, it had also been a month, but that time also felt wildly longer. For too long, it had felt as if Nezumi had only been giving him small kisses here and there. For too long, it had felt as if Nezumi had been holding himself back from Shion, and Shion understood why, was glad Nezumi was being cautious, was taking care of himself, was not forcing himself to feel comfortable around Shion faster than his memories and his past would allow him.

            But even though Shion understood all of this, he was not a patient man – Nezumi had informed him of this fact often enough. He wanted all of Nezumi immediately, and to get only kisses that buckled his knees like they were teenagers had him so sexually frustrated it was nearly maddening.

            “Hey,” Shion said, toeing Nezumi’s leg under the table.

            “Reading.”

            “You could make out with me instead,” Shion suggested, and Nezumi glanced up at him then.

            Shion smiled. Not much could distract Nezumi from reading, and Shion couldn’t deny it – he was pleased with himself that the idea of making out with him was more interesting to Nezumi than _Monte Cristo._

            Nezumi’s eyes had fallen to Shion’s smile, the way they sometimes did, and then Nezumi was closing his book.

            “Are you done your work?”

            Shion snapped his laptop shut. “Very done. So are you going to come over here and kiss me or what?”

            “I want to sleep at your apartment tonight,” Nezumi said, instead of getting up and walking around the table and kissing Shion, as he’d spent much of the time he’d meant to be working on his syllabus imagining.

            The afternoon sun, at some point, had lost its sharp edge. Was softer now, casted a low glow over Nezumi’s waiting expression.          

            “Is it – Isn’t it too soon?”

            “I don’t think so.”

            “It was a disaster last time,” Shion reminded, not having thought Nezumi would need a reminder.

            “I remember.”

            “Do you still have nightmares about me?”

            “No.”

            Shion leaned forward in his chair, elbows digging into the table on either side of his laptop. “Nezumi, you have to be honest with me, this is serious, I really don’t want to end up in yet another situation where you’re trying to strangle me. I could seriously hurt you.”

            Nezumi pushed his fork around his empty plate, scraping the tongs on the glass so that it made a terrible sound.

            “No one’s going to get hurt. I don’t have nightmares anymore.”

            “I don’t believe you.”

            “You should. I’m not the one who’s been known to lie,” Nezumi replied, putting down the fork, tucking his hair behind his ears.

            In the soft light, he looked beautiful. He always looked beautiful.

            Nezumi looked up from his plate. The shadows of his long, long eyelashes striped down his cheeks. “Why would I lie about this? I haven’t had nightmares in three nights. I waited to make sure they were gone before now, before asking to come home with you.”

            “Nightmares about me,” Shion clarified. “You haven’t had nightmares about me in three nights. But you’ve had them of other vamps – And I still have red eyes, if you wake beside me and see my eyes, even if you’re nightmares aren’t about me, you might still – ”

            “I haven’t had nightmares at all.”

            The setting sun turned Nezumi’s silver eyes a different color altogether. Almost translucent, like rainwater dripping down a window. “But – Don’t you have nightmares every night? Haven’t you always?”

            When Nezumi still thought Shion was human, when he’d slept in Shion’s bed for those few weeks, he’d woken up often in the middle of the night, tangled and breathless from a nightmare of his past. Shion couldn’t remember a night when he hadn’t done so.

            “Things change,” Nezumi said, after a moment, as if it wasn’t remarkable at all that for three nights, he’d been free of nightmares when, from what Shion knew, they’d plagued him every night all his life for twenty-one years.

            “Things like that don’t change,” Shion argued. “Maybe you’d stop having nightmares about me, but your past – that hasn’t changed, that can’t change, how can you just stop having nightmares – ”

            “Are you upset about this?”

            “I’m not upset! I think you’re lying to me because you want to rush this, and I want to rush it too, I want you to sleep over too, but it’s just stupid, it’ll set us back! You’re not scared of me anymore, and I don’t want that to change just because you want to have sex with me – ”

            “I didn’t suggest having sex. I suggested sleeping at your apartment. I don’t want to have sex with you, I know that’s a bad idea right now, I just want to sleep next to you,” Nezumi said back, his voice hard now, and then he was sliding back from the table, getting up and grabbing his plate and fork and walking through the front room to back door.

            Shion watched him for a moment, then got up as well, ran after Nezumi and found him in the kitchen, washing his plate.

            “We can do that tomorrow.”

            “It’s one plate, Shion.”

            “And a fork.”

            Nezumi didn’t look up from the sink. Shion waited until he finished washing the dishes, watched Nezumi dry them and put them where they belonged.

            “You really haven’t had any nightmares in three nights?”

            Nezumi strung his fingers through his bangs, leaned his hip against the sink counter, looked at Shion with a small crease between his eyebrows, a hint of his own confusion and something else, a pull of his eyes that made Shion’s chest tight. “I didn’t get it either. I’ve been trying to figure it out. I think it’s because they were never memories, really, they were just nightmares. The vamps in my nightmares, they didn’t look like you. They didn’t look human, like anything that could ever be mistaken for human. They looked like monsters.”

           “What they did to you, to your family, they were monsters,” Shion insisted, but Nezumi shook his head.

           “Monstrous, yeah. They did terrible things, they were murderers, they killed thousands of people, they killed children without remorse, they killed an entire dynasty in a night. But they weren’t monsters, actual monsters, like the monsters kids can dream up, the monsters under the bed, the monsters that live in the dark. The monsters that don’t really exist.”

           Shion stepped forward, wanted Nezumi to stop talking – his eyes were bright, now, his voice small. “Nezumi – ”

           “I didn’t have nightmares about my family, or the fires, or the piles of bodies. Sometimes I did, fine, but mostly I just had nightmares about the vamps. But they weren’t really vamps. They were like things out of my imagination, and I convinced myself that vamps were like that. I was a kid when it happened. My nightmares aren’t what I saw that night. They’re what I thought I was seeing. They’re what made sense to me. Monsters made sense. Something so far from human it could never be confused. Something so far from human I never had a chance to save my family, I never stood a chance of stopping them.”

            Shion walked through the kitchen now, stood in front of Nezumi, wanted to be closer to him but didn’t know if he was allowed to touch Nezumi, but Nezumi reached out first, touched Shion’s cheek, the make-up right above his scar.

            “You couldn’t have stopped them. You were a child, and there were thousands of them, and vampires have strength hundreds of times more powerful than a human.”

            “You’re not a monster. I should never have thought that.”

            “You were a child.”

            “I wasn’t a child a month ago,” Nezumi whispered. His fingers drifted from Shion’s cheek.

            “I will never blame you for being scared of vamps when you’ve never been given any reason not to be,” Shion told him. He looked up at Nezumi, at his pupils that weren’t completely dilated the way they used to be – a body’s natural response to fear.

            His eyes weren’t widened. His fingers on Shion’s cheek a second before hadn’t shaken, and Shion only realized this now, only realized now that Nezumi, somehow, didn’t look scared at all.

            Weeks ago, Safu had texted Shion a link to the national health board’s official page on post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD. Shion hadn’t put it together at first. Had opened the link and wondered why on earth Safu had sent him this, of course he knew about PTSD, but it had nothing to do with him, and then he’d understood, instantly, on reading the description.

            _Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event._

            He’d skimmed the article to the symptoms, then, and read –

            _PTSD symptoms are generally grouped into four types: intrusive memories, avoidance, negative changes in thinking and mood, and changes in physical and emotional reactions._

            He felt like a fool for not realizing it. For not even suspecting it. For thinking Nezumi’s actions were based on prejudice and stereotypes that had been engrained in him, when really, it was just based on trauma, terrible, ruthless trauma.

            Shion had not told Nezumi about the article. Had never mentioned PTSD to Nezumi, though he’d considered it, thought maybe having answers to his own physical reactions, maybe understanding why his body interfered with his own rationale and wants, maybe that would help him.

            Against these considerations was the fact that Shion knew Nezumi would likely reject the diagnosis. He was not a man who wanted to be diagnosed. He was not a man who would easily admit to suffering from anything.

           Shion wasn’t sure what would help Nezumi more. To know that this was a possibility, this was an explanation, this was an answer. Or to not know. And looking at the man now, Shion thought again about telling him, or just pulling up the link Safu had sent him on his phone, letting Nezumi read the article, letting Nezumi decide for himself what he wanted to do with the information.

            Nezumi spoke before Shion had a chance to decide. “So can I come home with you, professor?”

            Nezumi’s hair was already tucked behind his ears, but Shion lifted his fingers, went through the motions of the gesture anyway, just to touch him because now, he thought he was allowed to.

            Shion didn’t answer Nezumi’s question. He dropped his hand from Nezumi’s hair, caught Nezumi’s fingers in his own, pulled him out of the kitchen, to the front room where he threw his laptop in his backpack, and _The Count of Monte Cristo,_ and led Nezumi out the bakery, let Nezumi lock it this time.

            Shion held Nezumi’s fingers loosely, giving the man a chance to let go if he wanted, but Nezumi didn’t let go for the entire walk to Shion’s apartment, and then they were inside, and Nezumi only let go of Shion’s hand before toeing off his boots.

            Shion stooped down to untie his Converse before peeling them off. He laid his backpack in a corner of his room, and while he did so, Nezumi went into the bathroom.

            Shion heard the toilet flush, and then the faucet, and then the shower spray, and then Nezumi was sticking his head out of the bathroom door.

            “Shower with me.”

            Shion had been attempting to straighten out his apartment, which was a mess of clothes and textbooks he’d been reading in preparation for his courses.

            He’d never showered with Nezumi. There was a reason for that, and the reason was that neither _Warm Silk_ nor _Ghost Kiss_ were waterproof.

            Currently, Shion wore _Warm Silk,_ though he knew he should have been wearing _Ghost Kiss._ He hadn’t eaten for two weeks, and it showed on him. He’d begun applying his starvation make-up again – that would wash off in the shower too, and Nezumi would see not only Shion’s scar, but the rest of himself he hid from the man. The wan pallor of his skin, the concaves of his flesh, the sickliness of his malnourished body.

            “I’ll pass,” Shion said.

            “Don’t pass.”

            “Maybe you’re pushing it. Let’s take this slowly.”   

            “We’ve been taking it slowly.”

            “I’m not showering with you,” Shion said firmly, and Nezumi just raised an eyebrow.

            “Suit yourself, professor,” he replied, but he opened the door wide before he started undressing, and Shion found himself looking up from the textbooks he was meant to be organizing, watching Nezumi through the bathroom doorway – shirtless then pantless then sockless then naked completely.

            Nezumi threw Shion a naked grin before he stepped into the shower, out of Shion’s line of sight allowed by the open doorway, and Shion returned to his books, used to his own sexual frustration, the pulsing in his abdomen, the desire to masturbate at the very least – but there was no way he was going to do that with Nezumi in his shower, liable to come out at any moment.

            It occurred to Shion only after he’d finished cleaning his bedroom a suitable enough amount that Nezumi hadn’t taken a plastic bag into the shower with him, which was how Shion had imagined he’d been covering his cast.

            “Hey, shouldn’t you be – ” Shion stopped at the doorway of the bathroom on seeing that Nezumi had left the shower curtain open, was showering with his right arm held straight out, sticking out of the spray.

            “Knew you’d change your mind. You just wanted me to get the water warm, didn’t you?”

            “That’s how you shower? You should cover your cast with a plastic bag. And water is going to go everywhere.”

            “This is easier.”

            “Won’t your arm get tired?”

            “Come hold it up for me. Better yet, you can scrub me down, my left hand is basically useless and has no idea what to do with a loufa,” Nezumi replied. Water plastered his hair to his head and cheeks and forehead and neck so he looked like a wet dog.

            Shion laughed at Nezumi’s idiotic smirk and walked out the bathroom again.

            “Hey, where are you going?” Nezumi called after him.

            “Teach your left hand to use a loufa, I don’t want you coming into my bed dirty,” Shion called back, going to the kitchen, looking in the fridge to see if he had anything Nezumi could eat if he was hungry.

            He was reading the expiration date on a bottle of grape jelly Nezumi had bought at the beginning of the summer when the shower turned off. Shion replaced the jelly, closed the fridge, drifted back to the bathroom door to watch Nezumi step out the shower, getting water all over Shion’s bathmat and the surrounding tiles as he stretched to place a toothbrush on the edge of Shion’s sink.

            “Had to dig up a spare toothbrush from the bottom of your sink, what did you do with mine?”

            Shion didn’t bother telling the man he’d thrown it out. “You should dry yourself before you step out the bathtub, I’ve told you this a million times.”

            “Only a million? Felt like more,” Nezumi replied, reaching for the towel he’d left on the closed lid of the toilet and running it roughly through his hair. “You’re not allowed to look if you’re not going to touch.”

            Shion leaned against the bathroom doorway, watching Nezumi bend down to rub the towel over his legs. “How do you feel about my scar?”

            “Meaning?”

            “I’m going to shower now, and I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t put foundation on it when I got out. If you’re okay with that.”

            Nezumi straightened up again, caught his hair in a rope over his shoulder and squeezed the towel over it. Shion let himself look down the length of Nezumi’s body. Two months before, he’d been allowed to touch this body whenever he’d wanted. He’d been allowed to do whatever he’d desired to it.

            Shion exhaled hard, focused on Nezumi’s face again.

            “Maybe cover it,” Nezumi said, after a moment.

            “Okay.”

            “Professor, I – ”

            “I don’t need you to explain. I understand, it’s okay. It’s the first night you’re sleeping over again, it’s best I cover it. I just thought I’d ask.”

            Nezumi nodded, stepped aside, gestured to the shower. “All yours.”

            “Get out before I undress.”

            “So rude, I let you look.”

            “I only covered the upper body portion of my scar today,” Shion replied, stepping into the bathroom so the doorway was free for Nezumi to leave.

            Nezumi muttered unintelligibly under his breath, but left the bathroom, and Shion closed the door before undressing. He showered quickly and brushed his teeth, realized he’d forgotten to bring a change of clothes into the bathroom, and called through the door for Nezumi to close his eyes before he ran into bedroom room, grabbed sweats and a sweater, and returned to the bathroom to dress before covering the parts of his scar still visible – neck and cheek – with _Ghost Kiss_ , knowing _Warm Silk_ would show, and Nezumi would be looking closely at him beside him in bed.

            He switched contacts to a new pair, then left the bathroom, found Nezumi sitting against the headboard of the bed with his knees to his chest, eating out the jar of jelly with a spoon and reading _The Count of Monte Cristo._

            “You shouldn’t just eat jelly like that, it has a lot of sugar. Especially when you already brushed your teeth for the night.”

            “Don’t pretend to know about human nutrition, grapes are a fruit,” Nezumi replied, not looking up from his book.

            “And grape jelly is just sugar and artificial grape flavoring.”

            “There you go again, acting like you know anything about human food. Stick to blood facts,” Nezumi replied, as Shion slipped onto the bed beside him, liking a surprising amount that Nezumi was talking like this – casually about blood, about the fact that Shion was a vamp.

            Nezumi looked at him, the spoon in his mouth, and leaned away from Shion slowly, just an inch. He took the spoon from his mouth. Stuck it back in the jar and continued staring down at it even when he spoke. “Sorry. Reflex.”

            “Don’t apologize.”

            Nezumi put the jelly on his nightstand, slid down on the bed, and Shion frowned.

            “You’re not going to cover that and put it back in the fridge?”

            “It’s already expired.”

            “Then why were you eating it?” Shion got off the bed, walked around to Nezumi’s nightstand and grabbed the jelly, covered it and returned it to the fridge and the spoon to the sink before coming back to bed, getting under his blankets slowly, not looking at Nezumi in case he flinched again – Shion knew Nezumi wouldn’t want him to notice.

            He laid on his back, listened to Nezumi’s movements beside him, turned to look at the man only when he was still.

            Nezumi laid on his side, was watching Shion, bangs drifting slowly as if aiming to cover his eyes, but Nezumi reached up, caught them, tucked them behind his ear.

            “How do you feel?”

            Nezumi shrugged, only one shoulder, the other caught against the mattress. “Okay.”

            Shion looked from Nezumi’s eyes to his chest, watched his breathing – not too fast, but not fully relaxed either.

            “I’m okay,” Nezumi said again. There was at least a foot of mattress space between them.

            Shion saw Nezumi’s eyes tracing his cheek, as if searching for the scar he’d asked Shion to hide. “What do you know about PTSD?” Shion asked it before he could stop himself.

            Nezumi didn’t react. Kept looking at Shion’s cheek, then back at his eyes, and Shion wondered if Nezumi had heard him until he finally replied. “A fair amount.”

            “You do?”

            Nezumi’s cheek rubbed the pillow, clumps of wet hair jostling as he shifted, stilled again. “The manager’s convinced I’ve started doing drugs, and word always spreads around cast and crew. Maybe a week ago, Misaki – of all people – hands me a bunch of articles she’d printed on PTSD. Said she thought maybe that old Discreet Meat article that exposed a vamp in Tokyo had triggered it. It’s not a secret that I’m from the Gin Dynasty. She said she told the manager about it, this PTSD stuff, that if he fires me, I could threaten him with a lawsuit or something, claim my ‘erratic behavior’ isn’t something I can control.”

            Nezumi’s expression was mostly unreadable, a little skeptical, maybe, but Shion wasn’t sure what that skepticism applied to. It could have been the possibility of his manager actually firing him or the accusations of being on drugs or the prospect of filing a lawsuit were he to be fired or Misaki’s concern in the first place or the notion that his own behavior might not be under his control or the very idea of having PTSD.

            “You read the articles Misaki gave you?”

            “I read them.”

            Shion bit the inside of his cheek. Released it. “What do you think?”

            Nezumi looked at Shion carefully. “I think you shouldn’t be worried about me when you’re the one who’s starving,” he said finally, and it occurred to Shion that Nezumi was not looking for his scar under his make-up. It occurred to Shion that he was looking at the signs of his starvation – his sunken cheeks, the deep set of his eyes, the gaunt of his cheekbones.

            “I just want you to take care of yourself.”

            “As I want for you,” Nezumi replied. “My concern, I think, is more pressing, seeing as you haven’t eaten in two weeks.”

            “Vamps have stronger starvation tolerance than humans. And anyway, there’s nothing we can do about me right now.”

            Nezumi said nothing to this at first. Continued to watch Shion, then closed his eyes after a minute. “There’s always something that can be done.”

            Shion felt a crease form between his narrowed eyes. “What does that mean?”        

            “Nothing. Go to sleep, professor.”

            Shion worked to keep his voice from rising. “You promised you wouldn’t draw your own blood. In two weeks, Mom and Safu will be able to – ”

            “I know what I promised. I’m not going to give you any more blood for my allotted eight weeks. Stop insisting so much, it makes me think you didn’t like the taste. I might get offended.” Nezumi spoke without opening his eyes. Shion wondered how Nezumi’s calm expression might change, if he told the man the truth.

            _I loved the taste of you._

            Shion kept the words to himself. Closed his own eyes. He still had his contacts in, but he would leave them in, not knowing what kinds of nightmares either of them might have.

            Not knowing what might happen in the middle of the night when they were not conscious enough to control themselves.

*

It had been years since Nezumi had stolen, over a decade and a half, and to steal apples from a fruit vendor on the street as a scrawny kid who could weave unnoticed between legs was much different than stealing blood from a hospital as a grown man who was noticed frequently for how he looked and for his status as the last surviving member of the Gin Dynasty.

            So Nezumi knew, this time, he had to plan. From the day Shion had told him he’d finished his small stock of Nezumi’s blood, Nezumi began planning. Walked through three hospitals in Tokyo before he found one that he knew could work. Memorized names of long-term patients who could pass as family, or family friends, or neighbors, or wives or husbands or boyfriends or girlfriends, to give him an excuse to linger. Flirted with nurses and technicians and doctors, swiped keys and duplicated them and learned access codes and passwords and where the security cameras pointed and who worked what shift when.

            Security on blood supply was tight. Nezumi was not the first to want to steal blood for a vamp, and he was well aware of this, which was the only reason why he allowed Shion to starve without a drop of blood for two full weeks, the only reason he was able to watch Shion deteriorate in front of him without acting rashly.

            Two weeks, Nezumi felt, was enough. He laid in bed beside Shion that Friday night in late August and opened his eyes once Shion’s breathing had evened out. Shion slept with his arms folded in the space Nezumi had left between them on the mattress. His fingers were curled, knuckles touching the edge of his pillow, and Nezumi reached out, touched the pad of Shion’s thumb with the tip of his own finger.

            He had not been lying to Shion. He hadn’t had a nightmare in three nights. He had insisted on sleeping over at Shion’s because he trusted that he could do this now, and lying beside the man, Nezumi was not afraid. He felt no panic. He felt no worry – not for himself, and not for Shion, because tomorrow he would steal blood to feed Shion, a supply enough that Shion wouldn’t have to ration, that Shion wouldn’t have to starve, that Shion could feel as happy and safe as Nezumi now felt around him, as Nezumi planned to feel around him for the rest of both their lives – neither of which would be cut short by starvation or anything otherwise.

            Nezumi had lost enough people. He refused to lose anyone else he loved. He was old enough now and strong enough now to make a promise of this refusal to himself, and to keep it.

*


	18. Chapter 18

“Hang on a little longer, professor, I’ll be back soon.”

            Shion thought he dreamed the softly whispered words, but he felt a rustle in his hair, the press of lips to his hairline, and he opened his eyes to see Nezumi leaning up from him, away from him, sliding off the bed on his knees.

            Shion blinked, rubbed his eyes, pushed himself up onto his elbow. Nezumi was fully dressed, had turned away from him and was pulling his hair into a ponytail as he walked towards the door.

            “Nezumi? Where’re you going?”

            Nezumi turned, still pulling his hair through his ponytail. “I didn’t mean to wake you, go back to sleep, it’s early.”

            “What time is it?” Shion asked, turned away from Nezumi to grab his phone from the nightstand.

            Half past six in the morning.

            “Where are you going so early?”

            Nezumi hadn’t woken in the middle of the night because Shion hadn’t woken either, and Nezumi always woke Shion with his nightmares, the mumbles that he made sometimes rising to shouts, the kicking and the pulling on the blankets, the tumbling and the agitation from the other side of the bed more than enough to wake Shion.     

            “I’ll come back in an hour or so, there’s something I have to do. Go on back to sleep.”

            Shion sat up fully. “Where are you going, Nezumi? Where are you going?” His voice rose with each word. He could hear the panic in it. Nezumi was going to draw his own blood. Shion knew this, he knew this.

            Nezumi dropped his hands from his hair. Took a step back towards the bed. He was already wearing his boots. “Why are you getting so agitated? I’ll be right back – ”

            Shion scrambled up, was on his knees on the bed, legs tangled in the sheets. “You can’t. My mom – She drew too much blood once. I was young, just a kid, but I’ll never forget, she had to be rushed to the hospital, get blood transfusions, she barely even survived because they didn’t want to give her transfusions because they suspected she was a vamp sympathizer and she was almost put in jail until she somehow convinced them she wasn’t, I never knew what she told them though now that I think about it she probably told them about my dad, but that’s not the point, you can’t – ”

            Nezumi had returned to the bed, sat on the edge of it, had his hands on Shion’s shoulders. “Hey. Calm down. I told you I wouldn’t do that. I promised you. You don’t believe me?”

            “Then where are you going?” Shion demanded.

            Nezumi took his hands from Shion’s shoulders, cupped Shion’s cheek with his left hand, thumb skimming the side of Shion’s jaw. “For months, you asked me to trust you. You didn’t tell me your secret, and you asked me to trust you, and I did. I’m asking you to trust me now. There’s just something I have to do, but I promise you, I’m not drawing my blood, I’m not putting myself in danger.”

            Shion raised his hand. Curled his fingers around Nezumi’s, still on his cheek. “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

            “I never do anything stupid.” Nezumi paused, lips lifting into half a smirk. “Other than you.”

            Shion squeezed Nezumi’s hand. “I’m serious.”        

            “Why is it you’re so convinced I’m going to do something terrible? I’m not a terrible guy.”

            Shion tried to see something on Nezumi’s face that would give any indication of what he was sneaking out at six in the morning to do, but there was nothing but light amusement, a soft morning happiness, and Shion forgot for a moment that he was suspicious of Nezumi.

            He felt nothing but amazed, not to find any fear on the man’s face. Not to find any wariness. Nezumi’s family had been massacred by vamps, sucked dry and burned in piles of limp limbs for a full night, and Nezumi had witnessed it, all of it, and now here he was, without fear, without any trace of hesitance.

            Shion knew he was wearing his contacts. Shion knew his scar was covered. Shion knew his hair was dyed. Shion knew he looked human, but he was amazed anyway, at what Nezumi had done for him. For them.

            “I know you’re not terrible,” Shion told him.

            “Then trust me,” Nezumi said, and he leaned forward, kissed Shion, an early morning kiss, a kiss Shion hadn’t received from Nezumi in two months, a kiss Shion hadn’t received since Nezumi found out he was a vamp, and then Nezumi was gone, his lips from Shion’s and his hand from Shion’s cheek and he was walking to the door, opening it, letting himself out without looking back at Shion.

            Shion inhaled deeply, exhaled even more so. He sat still for a moment, then laid back down, closed his eyes, hoped to fall asleep, hoped that when he woke again, Nezumi would be lying beside him, safe and returned to him and where he belonged.

*

Nezumi began his heist five minutes late, due to Shion’s unexpected early waking and attempted interference, but other than this five-minute delay, everything went exactly according to plan.

            Nezumi walked out the Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital at quarter past eight in the morning with a backpack and suitcase and duffel bag full of chilled blood bags. He didn’t know if Shion had a preference of blood type, so Nezumi had gotten a little of everything – type O, type A, and type B. There were only a few bags of blood type AB, so Nezumi had left those, seeing as they were in scarce supply. He figured, if Shion was partial to AB, he could just mix A and B together and be satisfied with that.

            Nezumi thought about taking the subway, as he wasn’t in a rush. No one was chasing him. No one had even realized a thing was missing yet, and no one would until the next person needed blood and went into the coolers to see they were nearly completely depleted but for the seven blood bags Nezumi had left.

            Nezumi hadn’t roused suspicion with his luggage, as the staff he’d been flirting with for two weeks knew he was going on an extended business trip this morning, knew he was stopping in just to say goodbye to his fiancé, Tao Fukushima, a patient in the coma ward Nezumi had spotted on his first reconnaissance. A young girl, comatose from a bus accident for six months, but Nezumi still held out hope, had already sat beside the girl and spoken to her on several occasions for the benefit of the hospital staff walking past her room, had already brought her flowers and cards and apologized for not coming to see her earlier, insisting it had been too painful to be near her in this state, but now it was too painful not to see her at all, she knew he’d never been able to last long periods of time without her.

            Nezumi had considered claiming Tao Fukushima as his sister, not wanting the fiancé bit to ruin his flirtations, but love stories always worked better with audiences, and the members of the staff Nezumi flirted with could always entertain the hope that a six-month coma might be one instance when an affair was justified.

            In the end, Nezumi decided on calling an Uber. It would be cumbersome, having to deal with a suitcase, duffel bag, and backpack full of blood on the subway. Before requesting his Uber, Nezumi glanced at his own reflection with the camera app on his phone, making sure he still hardly recognized himself. As he had each time he’d visited this hospital – and Tao Fukushima – during the previous two weeks, Nezumi wore a pair of Shion’s brown contacts and had slathered his face and neck and hands and arms with _Warm Silk_ – darkening his eyes and skin tone so that he no longer looked like the sole survivor of the Gin Dynasty, so that he no longer looked unique at all. The wig he wore was short and dark brown, much like Shion’s hair, and he’d swiped that from the theater.

            The Uber came in five minutes to a coffee shop two blocks from the hospital. The driver offered to help Nezumi with his bags, but he insisted on handling them himself, if the driver would only pop the trunk for him.

            Nezumi placed the luggage in carefully. The bags of blood were four hundred fifty milliliters each – each a healthy daily supply for a vamp. Nezumi had packed his luggage skillfully, had practiced in his own apartment after ordering the luggage online and having it delivered to the local post office so that his address remained unknown, packing into each piece of luggage sandwich-sized Ziploc bags filled with four hundred milliliters of water each – they wouldn’t quite fit four hundred fifty. He’d tried several packing arrangements to figure out what allowed for the most bags to fit.

            Between the suitcase, the duffel, and the backpack, Nezumi had stolen nearly a year’s supply of blood. When Shion came close to running out, Nezumi would steal again from a different hospital. There were fifteen hospitals in Tokyo, but there were enough in mainland Japan to last Shion a lifetime, and there were blood banks too, and donation centers.

            There was blood everywhere, and people had so much of it, and there was no need for Shion to starve. He didn’t have to hurt anyone to eat, and Nezumi wouldn’t hurt anyone to make sure Shion ate.

            Theft was a harmless crime, after all, and after so much blood had been stolen from Nezumi, from everyone he’d loved, he found it only fair to steal blood back to save the one man that was left.

*

Shion was not able to sleep despite his efforts after Nezumi’s mysterious morning excursion, and considered going to the bakery, but he was feeling too weak to make the ten-minute walk if it wasn’t necessary.

            He tried, when he was around Nezumi, to hide his fatigue. He was largely able to succeed in this because, as Nezumi had done before, the man made Shion’s hunger easier to forget – and if not to forget, than at least easier to bear.

            Now, without him, Shion felt too exhausted to make it to the bakery, or to be useful when he got there, so Safu’s text, inviting him over so he could practice his lectures on her before his first classes on Monday, were a blessing.

            He headed across the street to Safu’s and got through half a lecture before he was too tired to continue, but Safu praised him anyway, put on the television in her living room and got out her knitting supplies. She had been trying to teach herself to knit for months now, as every generation before her in her family had been experts in the craft.

            “I just don’t see how they had the patience for it, it’s tedious and repetitive,” Safu insisted, showing Shion the progress on her scarf, which she’d been knitting for three months. It was half a foot long.

            “I think that’s what’s supposed to be enjoyable about it. The monotony, it frees your mind to think about other things while you create something without having to think about creating it.” Shion was in charge of the control, flipping channels aimlessly, settling on the news for background noise, mostly.

            The news was on the weekly weather forecast, and Shion looked to Monday to see thunderstorms were predicted for his first day of the semester.

            “It’s going to rain all day on my first day of classes, I’ll get to campus soaking wet. Maybe I should consider getting a car, but it just seems silly when campus is a ten-minute walk.”

            “You have to get one of those bubble umbrellas,” Safu was saying, but she trailed off when the weather forecast was cut off by the chime announcing breaking news.

            _“Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital was robbed this morning of nearly one-hundred percent of its blood supply. The time of this theft is unspecified as no security alarms were set off, the blood found missing only after a nurse went into the blood cooler to retrieve a transfusion for – ”_

            Shion gripped the remote control so tightly he accidentally changed the channel, and a commercial for diet pills lit up the screen.

            “Did they say nearly one-hundred percent of the blood supply was taken and no alarms were set off?” Safu was asking, while Shion flipped the channel back.

_“…connection between blood theft and the vamp known to be in Tokyo ever since the bust of illegal online vamp blood supplier, Discreet Meat, is at this time unconfirmed. Other possible suspects include vamp sympathizers who might sell this supply online to vamps, or – ”_

            “Nezumi,” Shion breathed. He dropped the remote on the couch, numbly rifled through Safu’s couch cushions but couldn’t find his phone.  

            “Nezumi? You think Nezumi had something to do with it?”

            “I know he did. This morning he – ” Shion had gotten up, nearly stumbled into Safu’s kitchen to search for his phone and found it on the counter beside the stove. He picked it up, called Nezumi, tried to convince himself there was a chance he was wrong, there was a chance Nezumi hadn’t done this, there was a chance –

            “Hey, I have a surprise for you, are you at your apartment or the bakery?” Nezumi asked on picking up.

            Shion’s breath emptied from his lungs. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t, Nezumi, you can’t have – Tell me it wasn’t you!” Shion realized he was shouting, which he hadn’t meant to do. Safu had gotten up from the couch, was standing in front of him in the kitchen, staring at him in alarm.

            “Why are you saying it’s Nezumi?” she asked.

            There was silence on the other end of the line.

            “Nezumi! Dammit, if you’ve hung up on – ”

            “It’s on the news already,” Nezumi said, not a question, and Shion sank down the side of Safu’s counter, the knobs of her drawers digging into his back.

            “Shion!” Safu crouched in front of him, held her hand out. “Give me the phone, what’s going on? It was him? That was him? He wouldn’t do that, he knows the risk of being caught is too much, he knows Vamp Hunters would be able to find you through him if he was caught, he’d never risk that.”

            “You have to give it back,” Shion whispered, trying to tune Safu out.

            “Are you kidding me?” Nezumi demanded, voice sharp across the line. “Look, I just got to your apartment, I’m coming up, are you in there?”

            “Give it back! Go back to the hospital and give it back!” Shion shouted.

            “Give me the phone, Shion,” Safu insisted, reaching out, grabbing the phone from Shion, whose hand had gone loose around it anyway. “Nezumi, it’s me. That wasn’t you, right? You didn’t steal all that blood from that hospital, right?”

            Shion watched Safu’s face, the crease between her eyebrows deepening as she listened to whatever Nezumi was saying to her until she was standing up abruptly, Shion’s phone pressed hard against her cheek.

            “Are you insane? How stupid can you be! You’ll lead the Vamp Hunters right to him! They’re probably tailing you right now, you better not have taken that blood to Shion’s apartment, I can’t believe you!”

            Shion didn’t bother getting off Safu’s floor. He was exhausted. He was starving. He pulled his knees to his chest, pressed his forehead against them, pressure building against the front of his skull. Shion’d had hunger headaches before. He was used to them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t excruciating.

            Everything about starving hurt. Just because he was used to it, just because he’d been starving most of his life, just because he knew how to hide it, none of that made it hurt any less.

            “A disguise? You think a disguise is good enough? I really can’t believe you, Nezumi, you realize you have to stay away from him now, not that it’ll matter, the fact that you’re at his apartment is already bad enough, and Vamp Hunters are smart, they’ll talk to everyone you know, one of your castmates or someone at the bakery will be sure to mention they’ve seen you with Shion, he’ll be killed because of you, did you not think at all? Did you not bother considering the consequences of your actions for one second?” Safu was shouting.

             “Safu, stop yelling,” Shion whispered into his knees.

            “You think you’re the only one who hates seeing him starve? You think you’re the only one who cares enough about him to do something about it? You think you’re some hero, stealing him blood? This was so reckless, Nezumi! You’ve put him in more danger!”

            “Safu,” Shion groaned, making himself lift his head from his knees. In the minute that had passed, his headache had grown to something unbearable. He wanted to curl on Safu’s floor and pass out.

            Safu looked down at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was sitting against her cupboards. She kneeled down again, pressed the back of her hand to Shion’s forehead as if he might have a fever, as if she didn’t know what was wrong with him. “Are you okay?”

            “Headache,” he whispered.

            “I’ll get you some Advil and water. How bad?”

            Shion tipped his head back into his knees instead of answering. His eyes watered and he clenched them tight.

            “I’ll get you sleeping pills instead, how’s that? Something to knock you out for a little,” Safu said softly. She knew what to say. She knew what to do. She’d watched Shion starve for over twenty years, she knew how to handle it, Shion’s headaches and the spasms of his empty stomach and the dizziness and the fatigue and the chills.

            She placed Shion’s phone on the floor beside his socked feet, face up so when Shion peeked up from his knees again he could see Nezumi was still on the call, and then her arms were under Shion’s, and she was lifting him up until he was standing unsteadily. Shion let her half-drag him to the couch, lay him down, position pillows beneath his head and blankets around him.

            “Are you warm enough?” she asked, and Shion nodded, rolling onto his side and burying his face in a pillow.

            Safu disappeared, then was by Shion’s side again. He hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes until he had to open them in order to see her when she shook his arm gently.

            “Take these, then go to sleep.”

            Shion took the pills she gave him. He didn’t ask her what they were. Her apartment was stocked with pills – pain pills, sleeping pills, nausea pills – just as Shion’s was. Shion was prepared, was good at starving by now. He’d been doing it nearly all his life.

            After Shion drank the pills down with the glass of water, he touched Safu’s hand. “Can I talk to him?”

            He’d fall asleep soon. He was tired already. He had maybe a minute or so before he passed out.

            Safu was gone again, then back with Shion’s phone, and he took it, laid it against his cheek while Safu sat on the coffee table across from him, still holding his empty water glass. Behind her, the news flickered.

            “Nezumi?”

            “Fuck, there you are, I’ve been talking to myself on this goddamn phone for five minutes. I’m on my way to Safu’s, I’m walking into her building now.”

            “You shouldn’t do that.”

            “Listen to yourself. Do you even know how weak you sound? Maybe you’re okay with starving, maybe Safu is, but I’m not. I wasn’t stupid about it, Shion. I won’t be recognized, I swiped your contacts and tubes of your foundation and a wig from the theater, I planned this for weeks, I did this right, no one will ever know it was me.”

            Shion’s body felt as if it were sinking into Safu’s couch. He tried not to slur. The sleeping pills Safu had given him were strong, already working. “I don’t want stolen blood. People need that blood.”

            “You need it!” Nezumi shouted. “If you have to be so goddamn stubbornly selfless, then give a shit about me, not some random people! Safu, and your mother, and me, we can’t lose you, so just – Just don’t argue with me, okay? I’m almost here, I’m right here.”

            There was a hard series of knocks on the door then, and Safu slammed the empty glass on the coffee table beside her leg before she stood up. “Unbelievable. That’s him, isn’t it? I told him not to come.” Her voice rose as she shouted at the door, still standing in front of the couch, “I told you not to come! Get lost, Nezumi!”

            “If you don’t let me in, I’ll break down your goddamn door!” Nezumi’s shout was muffled by the door.

            Shion closed his eyes. He was falling asleep now, a swooping heaviness pulling him, and he stopped resisting it.

            His head felt like it would split open. His stomach ached. He was so relieved, to let unconsciousness take him.

*

Nezumi would have kicked down Safu’s door just because he was pissed at Safu, but he had a copy of Safu’s key and used that instead, knowing that to bring unwanted attention to her apartment with Shion inside of it wasn’t wise.

            “Where did you get my key?” Safu shouted, once Nezumi let himself in and locked the door behind him again.

            “Duplicated Shion’s,” Nezumi said, not bothering to kick off his boots, going straight past Safu to Shion on the couch. He kneeled down, wove his fingers in Shion’s hair. Shion had his phone resting face-down on his cheek, but he looked asleep. “Hey, professor, I’m here.”

            “He took sleeping pills, leave him. They’re strong, if you wake him he’ll just feel worse.”

            “Sleeping pills?” Nezumi glanced at Safu, who had her hands on her hips.

            “Yeah, he had a headache, he gets those, and we deal with them, just like we deal with all the side effects of his lack of eating, just like we’ve always dealt with them long before you showed up.”

            “Lack of eating? It’s starvation, Safu, look at him.”

            “I don’t need to look at him, I’ve been looking at him my whole life,” Safu said roughly. “Where is all of it anyway? The blood.”

            Nezumi lifted Shion’s phone from his cheek, set it on the armrest of the sofa. “My apartment. I had an Uber drop me off a few blocks away from my apartment, got rid of the contacts and the wig in a dumpster, walked to my place, stashed the blood and washed off the foundation, took the subway here. I won’t be traced, Safu. The hospital staff thinks I look like someone completely different, they won’t find Shion through me, they won’t find me.”

            “You can’t be so naïve, Nezumi! Vamp Hunters are trained for this, you think you’re the only one who’s ever tried to fool them?”

            Nezumi pulled the blanket over Shion higher up his shoulders. “Shion’s been fooling them for nearly his whole life.”

            “Exactly. He’s had practice. You haven’t. You shouldn’t be here, you should never come near him again. If by chance they haven’t followed you here yet, you’re lucky, and you shouldn’t push your luck.”

            Nezumi laughed, a dry laugh, it was impossible to laugh a real laugh with Shion passed out in front of him, breaths so quiet Nezumi could hardly feel them on his fingers when he hovered his hand in front of Shion’s nose and slightly parted lips. “Safu, you’re a smart girl, so I know you can’t really think I’m going to leave Shion and never come near him again.”

            The next moment, there was a sharp smack on the side of Nezumi’s head, and he crumpled from his crouch to the floor, knocked off balance by the hit.

            “What the fuck?” he shouted, staring up at Safu, who hovered above him, her hand extended.

            “Speak to me in such a condescending way again, and I’ll give you a bruise next time. ‘You’re a smart girl,’ my ass!” Safu snapped.

            “You probably gave me a bruise this time,” Nezumi muttered, rubbing the side of his head and watching Safu stalk away from him. “You have to learn to control your anger instead of hitting me like this! Shit.”

            “I prefer to hit you, and the only reason I’m getting away from you right now is so I don’t do it again repeatedly and accidentally beat you to death for how stupid you’ve been!” Safu yelled, melodramatically, in Nezumi’s opinion, disappearing from the living room down the hallway, and a moment later, a door was slamming – to her bedroom, Nezumi assumed.

            Nezumi sat up, scooching closer to the couch and reaching back, pulling off the drawstring bag he wore over his back while Safu shouted through her closed bedroom door –

             “I’m calling Karan and she’ll kick your ass for me!”

            Nezumi opened his drawstring bag without bothering to reply to Safu and pulled out the two blood bags he’d brought with him. He wanted to wake Shion, to make him eat now, but for as sick as Shion looked, he looked peaceful as well. Nezumi put the blood bags back in his drawstring bag, closed it again, placed it on Safu’s coffee table and stood up.

            He realized he was still wearing his boots, bent down to tug them off, then leaned down to lift Shion’s legs off the couch. He sat on the couch cushion in their place, rested Shion’s legs – swaddled in blankets and sweatpants – on his lap.

            Shion didn’t stir. Nezumi wished he had a book, but all that was on the side table next to his side of the couch was a small stack of printed papers, and when Nezumi picked them up, he realized it was Shion’s course syllabus.

            Nezumi settled on Safu’s couch. Curled a hand around the bottoms of Shion’s blanket-covered feet, rested the syllabus on Shion’s shins and began to read about the Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture, only vaguely hearing Safu’s shouts from the other room as she presumably spoke to Karan.

            Nezumi didn’t care what Safu said about him to Karan. Nezumi didn’t care if Safu hit him again, a thousand times more.

            What he cared about was the man lying beside him, and the fact that now, Shion was safe.

*

Shion still had a headache when he woke, but it was vague, hazy, barely there pulsing along the sides of his head.

            He took the empty glass from Safu’s coffee table to the kitchen, filled it with water. Safu’s apartment was silent but for the trickle of water from the dispenser on the freezer door into his glass.

            Shion downed the glass, placed it in the sink, walked back to the couch he’d been sleeping on and was folding Safu’s blankets when he noticed the drawstring bag on Safu’s coffee table.

            He dropped the blankets on the couch again. Looked around him, called out, “Safu? Nezumi?” and received no answers. The television had been turned off. Shion’s phone was beside the drawstring bag, and he picked that up first. He had no missed calls, but one text from Nezumi.

            _If when you wake, I’m not here, call me._

            Shion sat on the edge of the couch. Called Nezumi, putting the phone on speaker and resting it on the couch beside his thigh, listening to the rings as he reached out for the drawstring bag, pulled it towards him. It was Nezumi’s, he’d seen it before. Sometimes Nezumi took it to the theater, had his script in there and a bottle of water, and Shion used to slip bags of Karan’s cookies in it for Nezumi to eat at rehearsal.

            Inside of it now, Shion saw on looking down into it, were two bags of blood.

            Shion took one out. There was a label on it, a barcode in the top right corner, a large letter “B” in the top left, and underneath the letter the words “Rh Positive.” Shion ignored most of the rest of the text on the label but for the words in the lower left corner – _Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital._

            “Shion.”

            Shion looked around, expecting to see Nezumi beside him, then remembered he’d called Nezumi and glanced at his phone.

            “Where are you?”

            “How do you feel?”   

            Shion looked at the blood bag again. Pinched the corner of it and watched the blood shift inside the bag. Swallowed. “Where are you?” he asked again, because he didn’t know how he felt.

            Hungry. He felt hungry.

            “I’m right here at your apartment, Safu and your mother are here, we’re just talking and didn’t want to wake you, so we came here. I’ll come over to Safu’s now.”

            “Talking about what? Why is Mom there?”

            “Safu called her, they wanted to talk to me. Don’t worry about it, I’m coming over.”

            “Talk to you about what?” Shion demanded.

            “About _my actions,_ ” Nezumi said, the words stretched derisively, Nezumi’s scorn clear.

            “Stealing blood from a hospital, you mean.”

            “I got the lecture from them, you don’t have to bother.”

            Shion squeezed the bag of blood. He almost wanted it to burst. Blood to pour out, seep into the knees of his jeans and the cushions of Safu’s couch so he couldn’t give into his temptation to drink it, so he wouldn’t have that choice at all.

            “I’m not drinking this. I can’t drink any of it.”

            “Give me two minutes,” Nezumi said, and then he hung up.

            Shion put his phone down. Sat still and looked at the blood for a full minute, then stood up abruptly, grabbed the drawstring bag with the other bag of blood, and took both bags to the kitchen.

            He emptied the drawstring bag. Positioned the two blood bags on the counter, side by side. The other one was type O. Shion had no idea if different blood types had different tastes. Safu and his mother both had type A. Shion didn’t know what type Nezumi had. Suppliers he’d gone with in the past doubtlessly mixed several blood types together.

            Safu’s wooden knife block was beside the sink, and Shion pulled out every knife until choosing the smallest one. He replaced the other knives. Held a blood bag – type B – over the sink. The only thing in the sink was his own empty water glass, and Shion took that out, placed it on the counter, out of the way.

            He needed the blood to go straight down the drain. He needed it to be gone, he needed to take away the option of drinking it.

            Even though that’d be wasting it. Even though there were starving vamps all over the world, maybe just a handful of them left, but each one of them no doubt desperate for just a fraction of the blood in the bag Shion held now.

            “Shit,” he whispered. He put down the knife. He didn’t know what to do, and he was relieved at the sound of a key turning in Safu’s door, the close of the door, the lock turning, the distraction of Nezumi walking into the kitchen.

            “Professor,” Nezumi said, striding forward quickly and taking the blood from Shion’s hands, pushing it across the counter out of Shion’s reach, cupping his hand beneath Shion’s chin next, tilting his face up.

            “Let go of me,” Shion said, though he didn’t try to move out of Nezumi’s loose grip. He let Nezumi examine him.

            “You look awful,” Nezumi said, offering his verdict as he dropped his hand from Shion’s chin. He reached around Shion, got the glass, looked inside it. “Is this clean?”

            “I drank water from it.”

            Nezumi set it down on the counter again. Reached for a bag of blood, but Shion caught his wrist.

            “I can’t drink that.”

            “You have to.”

            “You can’t tell me what to do.”

            “Sure I can, I just did,” Nezumi replied, pulling his arm, but Shion tightened his grip.

            It was Nezumi’s left arm. Unbroken.

            “I’ll wait for Safu and my mother’s blood.”

            “I already stole it, it’ll go to waste if you don’t drink it.”

            “We can put it online, ship it to starving vamps.”

            “You are a starving vamp,” Nezumi said, his voice hardening.

            “I never asked you to do this. You knew I didn’t want you to do this. You knew I wouldn’t want to drink stolen blood.”

            “Where do you think your old supplier got its blood, Shion?”

            “I paid for that!” Shion snapped, feeling hot, fully aware that Discreet Meat stole from hospitals. He had no idea how Nezumi knew that.

            “Yeah, but the supplier didn’t. If you want to pay me to drink this blood, if that’ll make you sleep better, go on ahead, I won’t protest. I’ll be your supplier. It’s the same.”

            “It’s not the same,” Shion argued, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know. This was wrong, Nezumi stealing for him was wrong, but Shion didn’t know how it was different now.

            Nezumi glanced down at his arm, Shion’s hand on it. “Either break my wrist or let go of me.”

            Shion only tightened his grip. “I don’t want you to become a criminal for me.”

            “A criminal? Do you have to be so dramatic all the time?”

            “Theft is a crime! Humans need that blood! The news said you took nearly all of the blood supply from that hospital, what about the sick people there that need blood?”

            “They’ll get it. Humans donate for other humans all the time, if you have to get worked up about a cause, pick something else. Humans who need blood transfusions aren’t suffering, they’re not going to die because of this. Now let go of me.”

            Shion didn’t let go. He felt his fingernails digging into Nezumi’s skin, tried to relax, but he couldn’t. “You think you did the right thing, but I need you to understand that you didn’t. People are convinced vamps are criminals. They think we’re uncivilized already, I don’t need to prove a harmful vamp stereotype by drinking this, I won’t do it, I’m not like that – ”

            “Stop caring for a second about what people think,” Nezumi replied coldly. “You could be the most upstanding citizen in Japan, in the world, but society won’t change.”

            “You changed. You had the biggest reason not to change, but you did anyway.”

            Nezumi exhaled hard. “You’re trying to tell me you’re on some personal vendetta to change the worldwide view of vamps, and your method of doing that is to boycott some stolen blood? This is what will happen, Shion. You’ll starve to death, and the world will still hate vamps, and nothing will change except you’ll be dead. And soon enough, the last of the few remaining vamps will be dead too, and the world will rejoice and move on.”

            “Now who’s being dramatic?”

            Nezumi ripped his arm free from Shion’s grip so forcefully his skin dragged on Shion’s nails, which were still digging hard into his flesh, so that pink streaks rose on Nezumi’s pale skin. Nezumi did not even flinch as he looked at Shion in a livid way. “Dramatic? Worrying about you is dramatic? Shit, Shion, you’re so goddamn stubborn about the stupidest things I can’t fucking deal with you sometimes.”

            The pink on Nezumi’s arm was darkening, and then blood was slipping out of his skin, and Shion looked at his own fingernails, the surface cells of Nezumi’s skin caught underneath them.

            “You’re bleeding,” he said softly, glancing back at Nezumi’s arm, taking a step back from him.

            Nezumi didn’t seem to notice. He was pacing, had his hand in his hair, and because of the angle of his arm, the blood dripping from his forearm went on a route toward his elbow in thin red streaks.

            He stopped pacing abruptly, walked back to Shion, who stepped away from him until Nezumi grabbed onto both Shion’s upper arms, his grip hard through Shion’s sweaters.

            “Stop walking away from me, I need you to listen to me.” Nezumi no longer seemed enraged in the same explosive way as a moment before, but his expression was still rigid.

            “Nezumi, your arm – ”

            Nezumi’s gaze was hard and focused, almost desperate, enough to distract Shion from the blood seeping out the skin of his arm.

            “I know you’re used to starving. I know Safu is used to watching you starve, and your mother is used to it, and it pains them, but they can handle it, they know how to handle it. But I can’t handle it. I’m not like them. You know what I’m used to, Shion? I’m used to losing people. I’m used to watching people die. And I won’t let that happen to you, and I’ll force you to drink this blood if you won’t, and I’ll make you survive whether you want to or not, you don’t have a choice, don’t bother thinking you do for even a second because you don’t, you’re not going to die on me.”

           “Nezumi – ”

           Nezumi’s grip on his arms tightened so hard that Shion gasped, lost his voice. “And don’t you fucking tell me I’m being dramatic. Dying isn’t dramatic. It’s reality, it’s what happens, it’s what’s happened too many times, you have no idea what it’s like and you think you can let yourself get close to death because you’re naïve and all you’ve ever done is survive it, so you think you can do that forever, but I know better than you, life is fragile and it doesn’t give a shit what you want or what you’ve survived in the past, so if you care at all about me, you’ll do this, you’ll just do this for me, you’ll just not starve, you’ll stop putting your life at risk and you’ll not die, okay? For me, Shion, I need you to do this for me.”

            Shion said nothing when Nezumi went silent. He couldn’t, his throat had completely closed. Nezumi still held onto his arms tightly. His gaze was concentrated and unwavering, calm, steady, without fear. His desperation had dissolved with the last of his words, and Shion knew Nezumi’s mind was made up, could see that easily.

            Shion could have argued. Nezumi could make up his mind, but so could he, Shion could be stubborn too, he could fight back if he wanted to, but he didn’t.

            Nothing he could say would take away the fact that Nezumi had lost everyone. Nothing he could argue would make Nezumi believe he didn’t have to worry about losing Shion too.

            Nezumi let go of Shion’s arms after a minute passed. Stepped back from him. Looked at his own arm, bangs slipping over his eyes, seemed to notice for the first time that he was bleeding, and he twisted his arm as if to look at all from all angles.

            “What the hell?” he muttered softly, seeming amazed at the scratches, as if they’d appeared on him by magic.

            “I scratched you when you jerked your arm free from me,” Shion said, to remind him.

            Blood had dripped off Nezumi’s arm onto Safu’s kitchen floor, just three drops, Shion counted them on the tile before watching Nezumi step to the sink, turn it on, stick his arm under it.

            “Tell me if I need to leave the apartment,” Nezumi said to the sink.

            “You don’t.”

            Nezumi turned off the faucet, glanced at Shion. “Are you sure?” On his forearm stretched four angry, raised pink stripes. The bleeding had stopped. The cuts were shallow.

            “I can control myself, I’ve told you that before.”

            Nezumi nodded. “Right. I know. Sorry.”

            Shion swallowed. He could smell Nezumi’s blood strongly – the earthy smell of Nezumi concentrated, more potent, more metallic and delicious. Shion wanted to crouch down and color the tip of his finger with the three spots of blood on Safu’s tiles, then touch his finger to his tongue. He wanted the scratches on Nezumi’s arm to bleed again, and he wanted to press his lips along them, catch each drop of blood as it seeped thickly out of him.

            Nezumi had taken a few steps away from Shion, was picking up a bag of blood and the knife Shion had left on the counter. He paused, knife in hand.

            “O or B?”

            “I don’t know the difference,” Shion said quietly. He didn’t move closer to Nezumi. He was watching Nezumi’s arm, wondering if it had stopped bleeding, the cuts clotted already, so quickly.

            “They don’t taste different?” Nezumi asked, casually, like he frequently discussed the taste of blood. He was slitting the knife through the top of the bag, a small cut, then overturning it so blood poured out of the bag into the cup. About half the bag of blood was left when the cup was filled, and Nezumi leaned the half-full bag, slit up, against the side of Safu’s toaster. “Straw or no straw?” Nezumi asked, lifting the cup to his own face, sniffing it tentatively.

            “I can’t drink that in front of you.” Shion made himself walk away from Nezumi, around Safu’s island counter to sit on one of her stools. He pressed his elbows to the counter, covered his face with his hands. The smell of the stranger’s blood from the bag was heavy, salty, a little like the ocean, an even stronger scent than the few drops of Nezumi’s had been, and Shion wished it wasn’t. His mouth watered for it and his stomach cramped, and he knew he’d be satisfied with the blood in this glass, but the craving that still flooded him was for Nezumi’s.

            “Professor?”

            Shion could tell from his voice that Nezumi was beside him. He could hear the dull clink of the glass of blood being placed on the counter. He dropped his hands from his face.

            “You couldn’t even sleep next to me without me covering my scar, you don’t want to watch me drink blood.”

            Nezumi blinked, leaned back. “That was a precaution. We were sleeping next to each other. I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and be half-asleep, caught off guard. I’m fully awake right now. Wash off your foundation right now if you want, take off your contacts. I don’t care that you’re a vamp.”

            “If you want me to drink this, I need you to leave.”

            Nezumi’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll dump it down the sink.”

            “Where are Safu and my mom? They can come watch me drink it if you need some verification.”

            “They’re on your side about this, they’re pissed at me and convinced I put you in danger even though they’ll let you keep starving yourself until you’re on the edge of death before doing anything,” Nezumi said tightly.

            Shion glanced at the glass of blood on the counter before looking at Nezumi again. He felt almost dizzy now with his hunger but knew better than to let Nezumi see this. “Stealing so much blood is a risk. For you and for me. You have to know that.”

            Nezumi’s jaw flinched. “I didn’t put you in danger.”

            Shion tried to speak gently. “I know why you did this, I understand, but – ”

            Nezumi’s fingers were curled into a fist on the counter beside the cup of blood. “I thought everything through, I just explained all of this to Safu and Karan – ”

            “We have more experience with Vamp Hunters than you do, which means – ”

            “That’s what your mom told me,” Nezumi interrupted stiffly.

            “And she’s right. You shouldn’t have done this, but you did, and I hate that you did –

           “I’m not going to watch you starve!” Nezumi shouted, slamming his fist on the table so that the blood in the cup trembled, and Shion held up a hand, alarmed at the sound of Nezumi’s fist against the counter, at Nezumi’s sudden violence.

           “Let me finish. I hate that you did this, but I’ll drink it, Nezumi, I will for you. I just need you to leave first.”

           The calm focus Nezumi’d had was gone. He looked flustered, now, his knuckles whitening in the fist he hadn’t yet loosened.

           “Why?” Nezumi asked, the word sounding strained.

            “I don’t want you to watch.”

            “I don’t care about this, you’re not drinking from a body, you’re drinking from a cup, and you don’t scare me anymore, I’ve told you this several times – ”

            “I don’t want you to be here! For me, for me, I don’t want to be around you when I’m drinking blood, please just leave,” Shion insisted. “When you were bleeding at the sink, you asked me if I needed you to leave. Now I do.”

            “When I was bleeding at the sink, you said you could control yourself.”

            Shion’s headache was coming back, as was his exhaustion despite just having slept for hours – he wasn’t even sure what time it was – after getting a full night’s sleep. Safu’s stools didn’t have backs, and Shion wrapped his fingers around the cushion to hold himself up.

            “Don’t argue with me, Nezumi. I told you I’d drink it, that’s what you want, but I have to do it my way.”

            “You’re going to dump it down the sink.”

            “I’m not going to do that. I promise – ”        

            “I don’t care what you promise me! I don’t trust you to take care of yourself, you never have, I can’t even look at you! I starved too, you know, when I was a kid after the Great Slaughter, there were years I was starving, but I never looked like you, I never looked even close to this bad. And I know how shitty it was for me, I remember all of that pain, so I know it’s so much worse for you – ”

            “I can handle it.”

            “I don’t want you to handle it!” Nezumi shouted.

            Shion freed a hand from the stool to press on his temples, let his palm cover his eyes.

            “You’re nearly falling off this goddamn stool,” Nezumi snapped, like it was Shion’s fault Safu’s stools had no backs, and Shion was about to use this retort – _What, is it my fault Safu’s stools have no backs?_ – but then he was being lifted, abruptly, off the stool, Nezumi’s arm around his back and the other beneath his knees, holding him to Nezumi’s chest.

            Shion dropped his hand from his face, curled against Nezumi immediately after realizing he was no longer on solid ground, or at least, on the solid stool that was on solid ground. “Are you carrying me right now?”

            “Still a genius when you’re starving to death, that’s good to know.”

            “Put me down!” Shion demanded, but he wrapped an arm around Nezumi’s neck, caught the fabric of Nezumi’s shirt with his other hand and held tightly. “You’re going to drop me, what are you doing?”

            “Just taking you to the couch,” Nezumi said, and at the same time, he was lowering Shion, who gripped him harder. “You have to let go now or you’ll rip my shirt.”

            Shion loosened his grip as he felt the couch beneath him. He released Nezumi, who stretched to get a blanket, wrapped it over Shion while Shion folded his legs underneath him against the couch cushion, relieved to be able to sink into something but having no desire to confess this relief to Nezumi.

            Nezumi was hovered over Shion, pulling the blanket over his shoulders. He let go of the blanket and crouched in front of Shion and ran his fingers through Shion’s hair, and Shion wanted to jerk away from his hand, wanted to yell at Nezumi, but he couldn’t.

           He wanted to be mad at Nezumi for stealing this blood. For bossing him around. For carrying him to the couch as if Shion couldn’t walk himself, for thinking he had to take care of Shion when Shion could take care of himself. For thinking he could control everything and fix everything when he was new to all of this, and Shion had been a vamp for twenty-one years.

           But Shion didn’t know how to be mad at Nezumi, when he knew that underneath all of Nezumi’s anger, underneath all of Nezumi’s coolness, underneath everything, Nezumi was just scared.

           Nezumi’s face was lower than Shion’s since he was crouching, but he leaned forward, almost close enough to kiss. “I know you pretend around me. I know you pretend you’re not tired, and you don’t have headaches, and you’re not lightheaded, and you don’t feel sick from hunger. You think I can’t tell, but I can.”

            Shion wrapped his arms around himself, hidden beneath the blanket. “I told you I’d drink the blood.”

            “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you not to pour it down the sink. You think you’re not starving. You think you’re not close to dying because it’s only been two weeks since you’ve had blood, and you’ve lasted thirty-three days before, but I don’t care about any of that shit. You’re starving, so you’re going to eat now, and I’m going to have to be here to watch you and make sure you do it. You don’t have the energy to protest, so you shouldn’t bother.”

            Nezumi leaned back from him. A single drop of blood had oozed out from one of the pink scratches on his arm – the middle scratch, the longest one. Shion breathed deeply. His mouth watered, in the literal sense of his tongue wetting, saliva beading on the sides and roof of his mouth.

            Shion swallowed. “Where are Mom and Safu?”

            “They went to the bakery when I left your apartment. I asked them to give us time alone. I told them I wanted to talk to you alone.”

            Shion was still looking at Nezumi’s drop of blood. He had never drunk blood from anyone’s body. He’d drunk from beakers and cups and blood bags and water bottles. He’d never thought he had any desire to drink from a body. He’d thought the idea would repulse him. He hadn’t known it’d be something he craved, it’d be something he fantasized about, it’d be something he wanted.

            A purely vamp want. A terrible want he felt so strongly he worried it would overtake his human wants.

            Shion looked up from Nezumi’s arm, nodded. “Okay. I’ll drink it with you here. But I want you to stand over there, against the wall. Away from me.”

            Nezumi’s eyes were lowered, on his arm as well. He must have followed Shion’s gaze, and then he was looking up, his hard features changed to soft realization.

            “Oh,” Nezumi said quietly. He didn’t say anything else, and Shion was glad for that. He didn’t want to know what conclusion Nezumi had come to. He didn’t want to know if this conclusion was right.

            Nezumi looked at Shion a moment more, then stood up from his crouch, left the front of the couch to head to the kitchen.

            Shion leaned back into the cushions. “A straw,” he called, having the sudden thought that it’d be best if Nezumi didn’t see him with blood on his lips.

            He heard Nezumi rifling through Safu’s kitchen, and then Nezumi was in front of him again, holding the cup of blood in one hand, a straw in the other. He placed the straw in the cup before holding it out to Shion, and Shion had to unearth his hands from beneath the blanket to take it.

            Nezumi stood up again, walked away from Shion, this time to the wall beside Safu’s television, across the living room from the couch. Safu’s apartment was much larger than Shion’s. Whereas his was only two rooms – the bathroom and the main room, with his bed across from the front door and the kitchen area in the far corner – Safu had a proper apartment, a bedroom and a bathroom and a full kitchen and a full living room too. Just the living room itself was nearly as large as Shion’s entire apartment.

            Shion wished it were even larger. Wished Nezumi was farther away from him, leaning against the wall, tucking his bangs behind his ears before cradling his casted arm to his chest with his left arm – the one with the scratches, the one with the single drop of blood, but it was smeared now, a tiny streak of brilliant red over Nezumi’s pale skin.

            “I’m safe here,” Nezumi said. His voice was gentle.

            Shion didn’t know if it was a question or an assurance. He hoped it was the latter because he needed assurance, he wasn’t sure. If it was a question, Shion didn’t know if he could say _Yes, you’re completely safe with me_ with as much conviction as he might have before the first time he’d ever tasted Nezumi’s blood, before the first time he’d started having nightmares of drinking straight from Nezumi’s flesh.

            Shion knew he should have told Nezumi about the nightmares. Especially when they happened more than once. Especially when they became recurring, constant, nightly.

            Even if Shion hadn’t told the man before, he should have told him now, at this moment, that he dreamed of drinking Nezumi dry, straight from the thin green vein at the base of his neck.

            Instead, Shion touched the straw, put it to his lips. He took a deep breath and began to drink.

*


	19. Chapter 19

Shion looked down into the cup as he drank, downed it in what Nezumi was sure couldn’t have been more than five seconds even though he was using a straw. He took a large breath afterward, and when he looked up at Nezumi, Nezumi could already see the change.

            While Shion had been sitting on Safu’s stool, he’d swayed as if about to faint, to fall right off of it. When Nezumi had picked him up, carried him to the couch, the man had lolled in his arms like a doll, limp and too light. His eyes had been glazed, even while he’d argued with Nezumi. His eyelids had been heavy, his movements sluggish and weighted.

            Now, Shion was alert. His eyes wide, his back straight, his movements quick as he stood up from the couch, peeling the blanket off of him and holding up the empty glass, as if Nezumi might not have noticed it was empty.

            “I’m just going to get the rest of the bag,” he said, and Nezumi nodded, stayed where he was because even though he was not scared of Shion, it was alarming, to see such a change in the man.      

            Nezumi didn’t move from the wall, could see Shion walk to Safu’s kitchen, around the counter, to the sink and the toaster beside it, against which Nezumi had leaned the bag of blood. Nezumi closed his eyes and could hear the crinkle of the bag, the pour of liquid into a cup, and then a silence during which Nezumi assumed Shion was drinking it.

            There was the sound of the faucet next, and Nezumi could tell from the way the stream of water was cut off that Shion was filling his glass. Drinking to rinse his mouth of blood. Nezumi wondered if the taste would still linger, how long it would last.

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi inhaled quickly, but he didn’t flinch. He opened his eyes, found Shion standing a foot from him, and Nezumi found himself looking at Shion’s lips for a trace of blood.

            But no, he’d used a straw. There wouldn’t be blood on his lips. Nezumi almost wanted to ask Shion to open his mouth. To let Nezumi look inside of it, at his teeth and between them and the insides of his cheeks and the roof of his mouth and the back of his throat, as far as Nezumi could see.

            “Are you okay?” Shion asked. A minute ago, his voice had been breathy, barely there, slow. Now it was clear. Now it was normal. He was so fucking healthy Nezumi was certain he was imagining it.

            “Come closer.”

            Shion looked hesitant, but took a step closer, close enough that Nezumi could reach out, grab Shion’s hand, pull him even nearer.

            Nezumi let go of Shion’s hand. Tilted up his chin. Held a hand under Shion’s face so he could pivot it, look closely at Shion, who let Nezumi do so for a few seconds before he was biting his lip.

            There was no blood staining his teeth. Rinsed off with his glass of water.

            “What are you doing?” Shion asked.

            “Why is the effect so quick? How does that happen? Did you even digest that stuff yet?”

            Shion lifted his hand, carefully pulled Nezumi’s from his face. “I don’t know how it works. That’s just how it is.”

            Shion was still holding Nezumi’s hand. Was looking down at it now, Nezumi’s arm, and his finger hovered over one of the scratches on Nezumi’s arm – Nezumi couldn’t even remember when Shion had scratched him – before touching the raised pink line.

            There was a little bit of blood smeared over Nezumi’s arm. Shion’s fingertip traced slowly along the scar until it got to this smear, and then it paused, and then it continued, smearing the blood a different way until he lifted his finger, looked at it, turned it to Nezumi.

            There was hardly any blood on it, stuck in the grooves of Shion’s fingerprint. Just a slight reddish tint.

            “Can I tell you something, or will it freak you out?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi squinted at him. Shion looked calm, at ease, relaxed now, when before he’d been angry and upset. He looked well-fed, and Nezumi understood that being hungry didn’t just affect a person physically. It ruined their emotions too, changed them, and to eat after a long time of not eating changed them too.

            “Tell me,” Nezumi replied, because Shion seemed to be waiting.

            Shion rubbed the barely bloody tip of his forefinger against the pad of his own thumb, as if brushing crumbs off of it. “Your blood tastes better than the one from the bag.”

            Nezumi had no idea how to reply to that. Shion had been looking at his own fingers, but his gaze lifted at Nezumi’s silence.

            “I felt like I had to tell you. I don’t want to lie to you about anything anymore. I don’t want to keep any secrets from you. But I don’t want to scare you either. I won’t do anything to you, you know that. But when I’m hungry, when I was starving, I had these dreams…”

            Shion looked hesitant, so Nezumi nodded, permission to tell him, that it was okay. Whatever Shion dreamed about, Nezumi trusted him.

            “I hurt you in the dreams,” Shion said quietly.

            “Dreams don’t mean anything.” Nezumi didn’t care. This information meant nothing to him. He could tell, though, that it bothered Shion, that Shion thought dreams had anything to do with reality when Nezumi had learned that they didn’t. They were wild musings of the imagination. They were misleading. They were lies.

            “It doesn’t worry you?”

            “No. And they don’t have to worry you either. You’ll never have to starve again. You won’t have these dreams anymore.”

            Shion’s gaze flicked over Nezumi’s face. “How much did you steal?”

            “I want you to have a bag a day. Not any less. You don’t have to ration anymore, you don’t have to eat any less than you’re supposed to.”

            “But how much?”

            “Enough, professor.”

            “Can I see it?”

            Nezumi tilted his head. “The blood?”

            Shion nodded.

            Nezumi couldn’t think of a reason not to show him. It was his, after all.

            Shion hid the remaining bag of blood – type O – in a box of cereal in Safu’s cupboard, removing the half-empty bag of Cheerios first and then placing it to cover the blood before closing the box, slipping it in the back behind a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

            They left Safu’s apartment, then, took the subway to Nezumi’s apartment, and as they stood in the rocking train, Nezumi could see the strips of foundation Shion had applied on his scar, lighter than his actual skin now that his color had returned with the blood. Nezumi guessed Shion had used _Ghost Kiss._ The foundation he used when he was starving, and Nezumi would empty Shion’s bathroom cupboard of the bottles later that day. Shion wouldn’t need them anymore. He’d never be that pale again, sickly and sallow.

            At Nezumi’s apartment, Shion insisted they take the stairs, and he was nearly running up them, and Nezumi remembered when he’d hardly even known Shion, the first time he’d gone to Shion’s university office, watching the professor run up the stairs.

            Nezumi had thought Shion was insane. Fascinating. Cute. He had not thought for a moment Shion could have been a vamp who’d been starving, who was suddenly energized because he’d finally eaten after too long.

            Nezumi, as he had that day months before, walked slowly up the stairs after Shion, listened to the clatter of Shion’s feet on the steps, caught up to him to find him breathing heavily at the landing of Nezumi’s floor, grinning wide at him, as if it was months ago, as if nothing had changed.

            But everything had changed.

            “It feels so good to be able to run,” Shion said happily.

            “Yeah,” Nezumi managed. He wanted to kiss Shion, he wanted to taste that happiness, but Shion was already turning from him, opening the stairway door, leading them onto Nezumi’s hallway and down it and to Nezumi’s door.

            “You know, you never gave me a key to your apartment,” he said, loudly down the hall as Nezumi walked slowly to him.

            “We never come here.”

            “Still, I want one. You have mine.”

            “Technically, you never gave me yours. I had to duplicate Safu’s copy.” Nezumi stuck his key in the lock, opened the door for them, let Shion go in first.

            “I like your neighbor. You should get to know her better, she seems nice,” Shion was saying.

            “How can you like my neighbor, you don’t know her.”

            “I talked to her that one time. She was nice.”

            “You said that already. This way, professor.”

            Nezumi made sure he locked the door after himself. Led Shion to his bedroom, opened his closet door and moved a basket of laundry and a vacuum cleaner and a lamp with a broken bulb he kept forgetting to replace from the closet floor. He had fashioned a fake wall for his closet, a long plank of cardboard he’d painted the same off-white as the walls inside his closet. He had drilled a hole in it so he could stick his finger in the hole, pull the plank from where it was wedged between the back and front wall of the closet. The plank acted like the left side wall, but it wasn’t. Nezumi pulled it free, held it by the sides as he carried it out of the way, leaned it against his bed.

            “Did you just take the wall out of your closet?” Shion demanded, sounding amazed and sticking his head into the closet as if he expected to find some gaping abyss in there.

            “A fake wall, move,” Nezumi said, pulling Shion out from the closet, then lifting out the luggage that he’d placed between the real wall and the cardboard plank.

            He set the suitcase flat in front of his bed and unzipped it, lifted the top and let it lay open before unzipping the duffel bag and then his backpack beside it. He stepped back, cradled his arm – throbbing from the heavy lifting he’d done with it even though he wasn’t supposed to be doing any lifting at all – to his chest, watched as Shion stepped forward to the luggage, tentative, almost wary.

            Shion kneeled on the floor. Reached out. Touched the bangs of blood lined up in the suitcase with just the tips of his fingers. Then the bags in the duffel bag, then the backpack. He pulled a blood bag out of the backpack, stared at it like he’d never seen blood before, and then he replaced it, carefully, before returning to the suitcase, rifling through the bags, hands quick and careful before he retracted them, almost abruptly.

            He stood up. Nezumi hadn’t said a word and neither had Shion. Shion was still staring down at the blood, but then he was looking at Nezumi, and Nezumi saw that his face was wet.

            “Professor?”

            Shion gasped, a quick suck of air, and then he was sobbing, and Nezumi had no idea what to do about this and was not given a chance to come up with a solution as Shion was walking forward, into Nezumi, winding his arms around Nezumi’s neck and sobbing loudly against Nezumi’s t-shirt, his body pressed tight to Nezumi’s.

            Nezumi stood still. Shion shook against him, his crying loud and wet and sounding almost painful, the pulls of breath into his throat, the way his sobs shuddered.

            “Shion, what are you – ” Nezumi cut himself off. He didn’t know what to say. He let his arms fall around Shion’s waist, touched him only gently. He was not afraid of Shion, but he was afraid of doing the wrong thing. He didn’t want Shion to cry harder. He thought Shion might break, if he cried any harder.

            Shion’s arms tightened around Nezumi’s neck. His face was against the neck of Nezumi’s t-shirt, hair tickling Nezumi’s jaw and chin.

            “Hey. Tell me what’s going on,” Nezumi said, trying to speak gently. His casted arm was useless, but he wound his left arm farther around Shion’s too-thin waist, let his hand rest on Shion’s lower back above the layers and layers of his sweaters.

            Shion continued to cry. He was a disgusting crier, noisy and wet, tears and snot and probably saliva too drenching Nezumi’s shirt and sticking the fabric to his skin.

            Nezumi let the man cry on him. There was nothing else to do but wait, so he waited, and after Nezumi thought the guy would certainly pass out if he continued like this, Shion seemed to be calming down.

            Enough, at least, that he wasn’t so loud. Enough, at least, that he picked up his head from Nezumi’s chest, looked up at him, face wet and eyes wetter.

            He sniffed. Nezumi looked down at him and thought Shion was an ugly crier, truly gross and covered in fluids, and even so, he still wanted to kiss the idiot. He could imagine already, that Shion’s lips would be salty from his own tears.

            Shion’s arms slackened around Nezumi’s neck, slipped down but not all the way off, settled in a loose loop. “Thank you,” Shion whispered. His wet eyes did not leave Nezumi’s. His voice was too emphatic. Tears were stuck in his eyelashes, and it occurred to Nezumi that Shion’s eyelashes were actually white, that he must have dyed them, Nezumi didn’t even know eyelashes could be dyed, that was much too close to the eye, the man was risking blindness.

            Nezumi nodded. He didn’t know what to say. _You’re welcome_ was the appropriate response, but it didn’t feel appropriate. It didn’t feel right, to have Shion thanking him, to have Shion looking at him like Nezumi had saved his life, like Nezumi was something amazing.

            Shion breathed deeply. Looked at Nezumi a second more in that way he didn’t deserve, then pressed his face back against Nezumi, wet against his neck.

            Nezumi slid his hand up from Shion’s waist, along his back, between his shoulder blades, over the nape of his neck and into the dark locks of his hair. He tightened his fingers in Shion’s hair. Wished he could wring the dye out of them so they became white again, so Nezumi could see what Shion looked like when he wasn’t hiding.

            Nezumi tilted his head down. Pressed his lips into Shion’s hair. They stood still, Shion catching his breath slowly, his exhales hot against Nezumi’s wet skin. His arms were still loose around Nezumi’s neck as if they might fall free any moment, but Nezumi pretended they were tight. Pretended he couldn’t move away from Shion.

            He would stand there forever, with Shion holding him.

*

Shion understood that Nezumi had been reckless and stupid and immoral. He should not have stolen blood, and he should not have stolen so much of it, and he should not have been so certain his actions would not draw the attention of Vamp Hunters to Shion.

            Shion knew he was at greater risk now. While nothing immediate had happened in the way of authorities showing up at Shion’s door, the Vamp Hunters could have been lying low, watching Nezumi even though Nezumi seemed utterly convinced he would not be recognized or traced due to his disguise.

            “You used my contacts and my foundation and a wig that you said yourself was about my hair color and style. What if they start looking at me as a suspect?” Shion had asked him, and Nezumi had just laughed.

            “Your human disguise makes you look like every other Japanese guy in Tokyo, you do realize that, right? You really are embarrassingly self-centered.”

            Shion had frowned. “That’s racist. And you don’t look like me.”

            “I’m not from Tokyo. City Japanese is different than country Japanese and all of that is different from Gin Dynasty Japanese. And I’m Japanese too, so I can’t be racist,” Nezumi replied, as if this was a sound argument, which Shion didn’t agree with, but he hadn’t pointed out that there were different regions of Japan even within the country with different variations of physiognomies, or that the city was generally a conglomerate of people from different regions who’d left those regions.

            Shion hadn’t argued further at all. To argue with Nezumi on the recklessness of his blood heist never got him anywhere, and Shion, for as much as he knew what Nezumi did was wrong, could not easily remain mad at him.

            He was not hungry. A week passed, and every day, he drank a full bag of blood. It felt like opulence. It felt like luxury. He felt guilty for it, thinking of other starving vamps, thinking of himself, how he’d been starving for decades and now, suddenly, just like that, was not.

            “Stop feeling guilty. Or feel guilty silently. Either one,” Nezumi complained to him, whenever Shion complained about his guilt.

            It was fair. Shion deserved to eat. It wasn’t opulence despite feeling that way. It was appropriate, it was exactly what his body needed, and certainly no more than that.

            Still, to get used to eating healthy was a strange thing. Shion had energy all the time. He wondered if humans felt like that, incredible as a constant state. Even when Shion had gotten a steady supply from Discreet Meat and other suppliers before that, it hadn’t felt this good. Supplier blood was always diluted, a certain percentage water. This blood was pure. It was rich and thick and viscous and so satisfying Shion thought his heart would burst, beating so fully, so loudly, so solidly all the time now in a way it hadn’t for decades.

            Nezumi was sleeping over nightly, after the first time the night before his blood heist. They didn’t have sex, but they made out extensively, and Shion didn’t even get tired, didn’t even get winded, didn’t feel anything but a want for more until Nezumi had to push him back.

            On Sunday night, eight days since the blood heist and since Shion had been drinking a bag of blood daily, Nezumi pushed Shion off him just as Shion had slipped his fingers beneath the elastic band of Nezumi’s boxers.

            “Why not?” Shion asked, disgruntled on his side of the bed.

            Nezumi had sat up, was pulling his shirt back down his torso, which Shion had pushed up as far as he could until Nezumi’s arms got in the way.

            “Don’t be so needy, professor.”

            Shion propped himself on his elbow. “You said you weren’t scared of me.”

            “I’m not.”

            “You said you were fine with me being a vamp.”

            “I am.”

            “You’ve watched me drink blood. Several times,” Shion reminded, and Nezumi exhaled heavily.

            “Is there a point to these observations?”

            Shion sat up. He’d stopped wearing sweaters. He had body warmth, and it’d only been a week since he’d been on a steady supply of blood. He hadn’t drunk blood like this – as much blood as his body needed without having to ration at all – since before the Great Slaughter, and even then, blood was expensive. More often than not, Shion had gotten by with less than his allotted pint a day.

            “Why can’t we have sex?”

            Nezumi looked at him for a long moment before lowering back down onto the bed, settling on his side and closing his eyes. “You have school tomorrow, go to sleep or you won’t wake up for class.”

            “I’m the teacher, I’m allowed to be late to class.” Shion laid beside Nezumi, slipped his leg between Nezumi’s, who kicked him. “Ow.”

            “Space, professor.”    

            “Why? Why do you need space from me?”

            Nezumi opened his eyes. “Why do you still wear your contacts and foundation to bed?”

            “Because you asked me to.”

            “Which should indicate to you that jumping into everything right now is a stupid idea. I’m not scared of you, I don’t care that you’re a vamp anymore, and every instinct I had pulling me away from you seems to be gone, but just in case all that shit I felt before isn’t gone for good, can you keep it in your pants a little longer?”

            Shion didn’t try to weave his legs within Nezumi’s again, but he slid closer on the bed, closed the gap Nezumi always left between them by just a few inches. “Yes. I suppose I can do that. You should know, though, I’m very energized now. Sex will be so different than it was.”

            “Was there something wrong with how it was?” Nezumi asked dryly, closing his eyes again.

            “No, but it will be even better. And I’ll be completely naked. Sweaterless, if you can imagine.”

            “Are you trying to seduce me?” Nezumi muttered, eyes still closed.

            Shion took his time looking at the man. He loved to look at Nezumi. “I’m happy you’re being safe. And honest with me. And careful. You just make it hard not to want you.”

            “Please don’t let that be the last thing I hear before I fall asleep.”

            Shion smiled. Leaned forward, bridging the space Nezumi wanted between them for just long enough to kiss Nezumi, a quick kiss, before retreating back to his own pillow.

            Nezumi opened just one eye. Appraised Shion silently, then closed his eye again, but he was shifting, his left arm sliding into the space between them, palm up and fingers curled loosely.

            Shion slid his own hand forward. Touched the tips of Nezumi’s fingers with his own, like they were keys of a piano he was playing, pushing each down one by one, then let his fingers fall between Nezumi’s.

            “Sweet dreams, professor,” Nezumi murmured. He already sounded half asleep.

            Shion squeezed his fingers lightly. He hadn’t dreamed of drinking Nezumi’s blood, of hurting Nezumi to do so, in a week, not since he’d eaten. The purely vamp craving to drink from Nezumi’s skin was muted now, did not come up in Shion’s unconscious, and Shion didn’t let his conscious mind think about it too often, hardly at all.

            In this moment, everything felt perfect, and Shion wondered if it could last.

            “Good night, Nezumi.”

*

Nezumi got to rehearsal early on Monday morning. It was the start of September, which meant Shion’s birthday was coming up – it was the next Saturday, actually, the same day as _Hamlet’s_ opening night, which meant rehearsals all day and then two shows back to back that would have Nezumi at the theater until midnight.

            Nezumi was standing outside the theater when his manager walked up to it, raising his eyebrows at Nezumi before retrieving the key from his pocket with the hand not holding his cup of coffee.

            “Nezumi.”

            “I need to talk to you before rehearsal starts.”

            “Aren’t you talking to me right now?”

            Nezumi drummed his fingers on his cast. He had an appointment to get it off in two days. Nezumi hadn’t thought his bones had healed at all, as his arm had ached routinely since it’d been broken, but strangely, it had been pain-free since the previous Saturday, nine days before.

            He’d mentioned this to Shion, who’d smiled. _Sometimes physical pain has psychological roots. Last Saturday, because of you, I stopped starving._

            _What should my arm have to do with your starvation?_ Nezumi had wanted to ask back, but he knew quite well what watching Shion starve had done to him.

            The manager led the way through the theater, flicking on lights as he went, heading backstage to his office. Nezumi followed him, all the way into his office, where Kage leaned against his desk.

            “What, Nezumi?”

            Nezumi rubbed the back of his neck. He knew he wasn’t in the best place with his manager. Asking for a night off – opening night – would not go well. He was only on lights, and Nezumi knew Shunsuke would cover for him, but he couldn’t get himself to ask.

            He shrugged. “Nothing, never mind.”

            Kage crossed his arms over his chest. “When’s that cast coming off?”

            “Wednesday.”

            “This Wednesday?”

            Nezumi nodded, took a step back towards the door, but Kage spoke again before he could leave.

            “What are Ophelia’s last lines?”

            Nezumi paused. “She sings,” he said finally.

            “Go on.”

            Nezumi hesitated, holding his arm to his chest. He took a breath, let it out slowly, took another, then began to sing, _“For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy…”_

            Kage held his hand up at _His beard was white as snow_ , and Nezumi stopped singing.

            “You’ll be Ophelia. I’ll tell the understudy. Be at cast rehearsal today, forget about running crew.”

            Nezumi blinked. “I was switched to lights,” he said, after a moment.

            “Do I look like I care?”

            “I’m the understudy.”

            “And I just told you you’re not. Don’t tell me you’ve developed a passion for stage crew, I know you, Nezumi, I know you couldn’t give a shit about turning on and off some lights.”

            Nezumi didn’t argue. His manager was right. He hadn’t developed a passion for stage crew. He was an actor.

            Nezumi paused at the door, glanced back at his manager, who’d gone around his desk, was rifling in his top drawer for something.

            “Kage. Thanks.” It was the first time Nezumi could recall saying his manager’s name.

            Kage didn’t look up. “Tell make-up Misaki when she comes in, she’s going to lose it at the change in cast and she’ll want to get your make-up sorted. Let her do that before you come to cast rehearsal, last thing I need is Misaki down my throat first thing in the morning. I swear that girl thinks the entire theatrical experience is rooted in immaculate make-up.”

            Nezumi nodded even though Kage wasn’t looking at him, then went to the front of the theater where he would see Misaki when she walked in so she could get his make-up figured out right away, so he could join the rest of the cast in rehearsal as soon as possible. Already, he itched to be on stage again.

*

In the middle of Shion’s midday lecture on Wednesday, the double doors opened in the back of the lecture hall. Shion paused to look at the latecomer and saw that it was Nezumi, standing in front of the double doors with a pillow case over his arm.

            Shion’s pillow case, if he was not mistaken. It was certainly the same blue fabric as the bedsheet set that Shion owned, and Shion found himself forgetting where he was in the lecture, watching Nezumi bound down the lecture steps.

            “Um, class – five-minute break,” he managed, as Nezumi reached the stage, jumped onto it unnecessarily instead of using the stairs. The students in Shion’s lecture were murmuring – probably about Nezumi, as he was certainly someone to murmur about.

            Even disregarding the dramatic entrance, the man demanded the room’s attention. He was beautiful. His hair was down, rare for him, especially in the summer. There were two small braids woven like a crown around his head, and there were tiny flowers in his hair, like constellations, or snow that somehow hadn’t melted in the early September heat.

            Nezumi wore make-up too, eyeliner and that had to be mascara – he had long lashes, but no one had natural lashes that thick, visible nearly from across the lecture hall.

            But it wasn’t Nezumi’s make-up or hair that made him especially beautiful in that moment, whipping open the double doors, running down the steps, jumping up the stage, stopping in front of Shion – too close to him, and Shion stepped back, thinking that all of his students must have been watching him. Watching Nezumi, surely, because the man was smiling, a wide smile, almost unfamiliar on his face, and Shion found himself wanting to touch it, tucking his hands in his pockets to stop himself from doing so.

            “What are you doing here?” Shion asked him. Nezumi hadn’t come to his lectures since the fall semester of the year before, when they’d met. Shion tried to remember the first day of his first lecture of the fall semester the previous September. That would have been the first time he’d ever seen Nezumi, sitting in his lecture hall among the students, pretending to be one.

            A full year had passed since then, but it felt like more than a lifetime.

            “Are you ready, professor?” Nezumi asked, still grinning wide.

            “Is that my pillowcase?” Shion asked back, not knowing what he was supposed to be ready for, but he thought the answer was no. He didn’t feel ready. He felt amazed at Nezumi bursting into his lecture and running down the stairs. At Nezumi standing in front of him in the middle of his lecture. At Nezumi’s smile.

            “I wanted you to be the first to see. Since you were the one who broke it, and all,” Nezumi said, and then he was pulling off the pillow case with flourish. Beneath it, of course, was Nezumi’s arm.

            Castless. Unbroken. A little thinner than his left arm, a little paler, but otherwise perfect.

            Shion untucked his hands from his pockets. Reached out cautiously, as if he’d never seen an arm before. Touched Nezumi’s fingers first, the fingertips, traced up Nezumi’s palm, to his wrist, to his arm, the skin incredibly warm.

            “What do you think?” Nezumi asked, like he had to pass a test, like Shion had a standard for arms, and Nezumi was eager to reach it.

            Shion looked up from Nezumi’s arm. Nezumi’s smile was softer now. He looked happy and nothing but happy, a silly kind of happy, childish and innocent and amused and carefree. A few strands of his hair were caught in his eyelashes, stuck in the mascara, that had to be mascara. The tiny braids started at his temples and wove back around his head.

            “You have flowers in your hair,” Shion told him. It wasn’t an answer to Nezumi’s question, but Shion had already forgotten Nezumi’s question. Looking at the man, he could forget everything.

            “A birthday surprise. You’re not supposed to know about it yet. Karan will give you the tickets. I have to go, the manager knows I’m getting my cast off right now, but it only takes ten minutes to saw the thing off, and as he says, I’m on thin ice, he’s crazy and probably calling my doctor at this moment to find out where I am. See you tonight, make sure you teach these kids something important.”

            Nezumi was leaning forward, kissing Shion before Shion had even processed what Nezumi had said, and then Nezumi was leaning back, running to the edge of the stage, stopping abruptly, trotting a few feet to where he’d thrown the pillowcase, grabbing it in a swoop of his arm – his right arm, it’d just been broken, but now it wasn’t – and then he was hopping off the stage, running up the steps of the lecture hall, bursting out the doors and out of sight completely.

            Shion watched the double doors close, and then there were whistles from his students in the lecture hall, hollers and shouts and a few students were clapping, and Shion stared at all of them.

            As if they’d never seen anyone get kissed before. As if it was something unbelievable, something amazing, something unexpected.

*

Friday was dress rehearsal, and because the manager was a dictator, he started dress rehearsal at noon and had them repeat the play until midnight.

            That left Nezumi with his morning free, and he woke early with Shion at quarter to five, standing against the sink to eat his cereal blearily while Shion stuck a straw in his bag of blood and drank, leaning beside him.

            “You shouldn’t have gotten up so early, you’ll be exhausted at rehearsal.”

            “Mm,” Nezumi hummed. He preferred not to speak in the mornings. It was too early to speak. It was too early to be awake in the first place.

            Shion finished eating first, the straw he sucked on picking up air alongside the last drops of blood and making that gurgling noise before he stopped.

            “Are you almost done? I’ll brush my teeth and then we’ll go,” Shion said, leaning closer to Nezumi to peer into his cereal bowl. His hair tickled the bottom of Nezumi’s chin, and Nezumi didn’t think, let go of his spoon and caught Shion’s chin, tilted his face up, kissed him.

            Shion kissed back, and Nezumi almost dropped his bowl of cereal. He pulled back abruptly, and then Shion was pressing his hand over his lips, making a small noise into his palm, startled, maybe.

            Nezumi froze for a moment, then licked his lips. The taste of blood was not unfamiliar, and Nezumi wondered how he knew it in such an unalarming way. Maybe he’d bitten his tongue or the insides of his cheeks. Maybe the taste was familiar from childhood, losing his baby teeth, his gums bleeding.

            It was metallic-y, like licking a penny. A little saltier, perhaps.

            Shion was staring at him with wide eyes, hand still over his lips as if to hide them. His eyes were dark brown, almost black. His scar was covered. It was always like that, and Nezumi wondered when that would change along with everything else that was changing.

            “I prefer Captain Crunch,” Nezumi finally said, because Shion seemed to be waiting for him to say something. He picked up his spoon again, ate another spoonful. The cool milk and sweet cereal mingled with the hint of blood that remained on his tongue, a strange cocktail Nezumi crinkled his nose at.

            Shion dropped his hand from his lips. He smiled a tentative smile. Blood stained his teeth pink. “Good. I wasn’t going to share,” he said, awkwardly, and Nezumi knew Shion found it strange to joke about drinking blood, to even talk about drinking blood.

            Nezumi had found it strange too, but he’d done it for Shion, so Shion would understand that this didn’t matter to him anymore, and now it was less strange to speak so casually about Shion being a vamp.

            Now, it was normal, and Shion was walking away from him, into the bathroom where he’d brush away any remnant of blood from his mouth, where his teeth would be stripped white again.

            Nezumi swallowed his cereal. Ran his tongue over his own teeth. He wasn’t sure if it was in his head, or if the taste of blood lingered.

*

It wasn’t hard to figure out his “birthday surprise” as Nezumi had called it, even though Nezumi never actually admitted to being put back in the play. Shion knew, anyway, that Nezumi’s manager would never have been able to keep Nezumi in stage crew. The man was meant to be on stage, and on the night of Shion’s birthday when he took his seat between Karan and Safu and faced the curtain-covered stage, he wondered if this was the best birthday of his life.

            Two weeks had passed since Nezumi’s blood heist, and there was still no sign of Vamp Hunters. Shion was happy and he was well-fed and he felt safe and he was in love, and was loved back, fully and completely with no secrets to taint it.

            He was twenty-eight today. He knew most vamps – those that were still alive in the first place – had miniscule chances of surviving until their next birthdays, but Shion no longer doubted that he’d get to live until twenty-nine, or thirty, or thirty-one, or any of the numbers that came next.

            Maybe a lifetime, even. A human lifetime, because vamp lifetimes were never that long even though, allegedly, they could live that long if they were given the chance.

            Nezumi gave Shion that chance.

            “Ophelia is a minor role. I’d have thought the great Nezumi would be Hamlet,” Safu said, her sarcasm not unexpected. She was still pissed at Nezumi for the blood heist, talked to him sparingly when they were in the bakery together, but Shion thought she was acting angrier than she actually was. Sometimes, she let down her guard, and Shion caught her staring at him in amazement.

            Shion understood. In the mornings, he sometimes stripped completely and stared at himself too. His body was changing. It’d been two weeks since he was eating right, but already, every sign of malnourishment had disappeared. His face was rounder, his shoulders somehow wider, his chest no longer sunken and his ribs only visible if he sucked in his stomach and let out all the air in his lungs.

            Shion was no longer ashamed of his own body. He was eager for Nezumi to see it like this, erase every other memory Nezumi had of it when Shion knew he had been something frightening to look at, skeletal and corpselike. But he understood that Nezumi was cautious and tried not to pressure him too often.

            “He got Hamlet initially and asked for Ophelia,” Shion replied patiently.

            “Why on earth would he do that?”

            “You could always ask him. I’m sure he’d be glad to tell you himself. You could start talking to him again – ”

            “Forget it. Is he going to wear a dress?”

            The lights flickered, and the curtains parted, and a silence rushed over the audience, but not before Shion whispered back –

            “I hope so.”

            He didn’t look at Safu to see her reaction. He kept his eyes on stage, waiting for Nezumi to appear. Shion knew Ophelia didn’t enter until the third scene, but even so, he wondered if he could hold his breath until then.

            Already, Shion ached for Nezumi. It was a want he wasn’t sure could ever be satisfied even if he lived a full human lifetime. Even if he lived forever.

*

Nezumi sat in the middle of Shion’s bed and watched Shion pace in front of him.

            “You’re sure?” Shion asked, stopping his pacing abruptly.

            “If you ask me that again I’ll have to throw something at you, and the only things in reach are these pillows and our phones. I’ll warn you from now, I’m more inclined to throw the latter,” Nezumi replied. He crossed his legs, leaned back with his palms against Shion’s mattress. “If you want to have sex, this comes first.”

            “Sex can definitely come first.”

            “Shion.”

            Shion exhaled heavily, dramatically, then stalked to the bathroom, shut the door loudly.

            Nezumi listened to the shower turn on and picked up his phone while he waited. He checked the news, as he did daily, sometimes several times a day. Fifteen days had passed since he’d stolen the blood, and Nezumi didn’t expect anything to happen, but he checked the news just in case.

            If there were any leads, he had to be the first to know.

            The shower spray turned off just as Nezumi was satisfied that there was no new information about his own heist. There was shuffling noises in the bathroom, and then Shion calling out – “Are you sure?”

            “You better duck when you walk out of there because I’m throwing your phone at you,” Nezumi called back.

            He could basically hear Shion steeling himself, almost wanted to roll his eyes, but he didn’t because then the bathroom door was opening, and Shion was walking out in just his briefs.

            He stood in the doorway. His eyes were closed. There was a pink scar wrapped around his body, and Nezumi had seen it before – on his cheek and neck the night Nezumi had given Shion his own blood – but this was different. The scar was everywhere, strung around Shion’s body like a ribbon, starting from his left foot and winding up.

            Nezumi uncrossed his legs, slid to the edge of the bed and then off of it, walked toward Shion and touched where the scar slipped over his hip just above the band of his briefs.

            Shion inhaled sharply, then laughed lightly. “Sorry, I didn’t even hear you walk up to me. I’m nervous.”

            “Don’t be.” Partly, Nezumi was looking at the scar. The scar of his nightmares and the scar his sister had painted over his skin with fingers shaking from her own laughter and the scar Nezumi had smeared on his own face and neck the night everything changed.

            Nezumi was amazed by it and gutted by it, but besides the scar, he was looking at Shion himself. The man’s nearly naked body. His chest and torso, his stomach. It was flat, but it wasn’t caved in. Shion was skinny, but he wasn’t malnourished.

            Healthy, he was healthy, and this felt more noticeable, even, than the scar that Nezumi touched.

            He traced it upwards, but it wound behind Shion, so he had to lift his fingers, touch it again when it reappeared on Shion’s neck, then again on Shion’s cheek.

            At the end of it, Nezumi lifted his fingers once more, touched his thumb to Shion’s dyed eyelashes.

            “Open your eyes.”

            Nezumi expected another _Are you sure?_ but he didn’t get one. Shion opened his eyes, and they were red, and Nezumi had seen them like this before, the same night he’d seen Shion’s scar, but they looked different now.

            Alert and alive. Shion wasn’t on his deathbed. Nezumi wasn’t offering his blood, wasn’t sitting on the toilet seat while Safu took it from him syringe by syringe. Everything was different now.

            “You can stop looking at me like you’re worried I’m going to freak out.”

            “I am worried,” Shion said.   

            Nezumi had not forgotten his past. He had not forgotten his family. He had not forgotten what had been done to them, and he had not forgiven, and he never would.

            Shion had nothing to do with forgetting and forgiving. Shion was something new. Nezumi wasn’t sure if he had PTSD. If he was recovering from it, and that was why his pulse wasn’t rocketing, and his palms weren’t sweating, and he had no urge to step away from Shion.

            He didn’t know anything about that, the psychological effects of his childhood, what that had done to him, what that had turned him into, how that had changed him.

            But Shion had changed him too. And Nezumi didn’t understand all of that either, but he understood some of it. Enough of it.

            “Don’t be,” Nezumi said again. He leaned closer, kept looking at Shion’s eyes until Shion closed them, or maybe Nezumi closed his own eyes first, he wasn’t sure, and then they were kissing.

            It was not a quick kiss, but not an entirely long one either, and then Shion was pulling back, fingers strung in Nezumi’s hair.

            “You have to go to the theater,” Shion whispered.

            “Let my manager fire me,” Nezumi whispered back. He kissed Shion again, held his waist and guided him against the doorframe. Every time he stopped kissing Shion long enough to see the red of his eyes, he felt a thrill of shock slip through him, a whip of heat.

            It wasn’t a bad heat at all.

*


	20. Chapter 20

Karan had not been angry at Nezumi, the way Safu still kept up, but Shion had noticed she was not as warm.

            She was wary, and Shion knew this. The blood heist was not going away. It was in the news often, articles about the continued search for evidence on who the thief had been, what their affiliation with vamps was – and this affiliation, the public was convinced, was undeniable. No one stole blood if not for vamps, or for one single vamp.

            Employees at the hospital were all interviewed, their interviews released in the news. Security tapes were reviewed – also released to the public. There was no part of the investigation that was hidden, which kept it fresh in the minds of everyone in Tokyo, even three full weeks after Nezumi had stolen the blood.

            There were several leads, but they were all wrong. Nobody suspected Nezumi. Nobody suspected Shion, or Karan, or Safu. Nobody knew they existed, but Shion understood that his mother, like Safu, and like Shion himself, believed Nezumi had put them at risk.

            He had. The risk hadn’t gone away just because Nezumi hadn’t been caught yet, or because Shion hadn’t yet been found. The risk would remain as long as the investigation remained ongoing, and it would remain ongoing for a very long time. A vamp hunt was not something to get over, to give up on.

            On a Sunday morning just past three weeks since his blood heist and before Nezumi’s afternoon and night shows, Nezumi was helping Shion and Karan open the bakery. Shion wore his human disguise even though at home, with Nezumi, he didn’t anymore.

            Of course, to leave the apartment meant to cover himself up, even if he was going to spend most of the day in the kitchen only with people who knew he was a vamp.

            Nezumi was cutting dough in strips when Shion realized they were out of cupcake liners, and he left the kitchen to check the storage room.

            He found a bag of them, pink and blue and yellow and green, and he retrieved them from the closet, returned to the kitchen to stand outside the swinging door, hearing voices within it.

            He leaned closer to the door. Listened, holding the cupcake liners to his chest.

            “…and I know you’ve been worried, but Karan, I would never – ”

            “Stop for a second, Nezumi. I know you said you have something to say to me, but I have something to say as well, and I should have said it earlier. Can I go first?”

            “Um. Okay.”

            “Since the Great Slaughter, I’ve let my son starve. I thought it was good enough that he was alive. I made myself bear it, and Shion get used to it, because I thought there was no other option. I thought this was good enough, even though I knew this would be Shion’s quality of life for the rest of his life – barely living, barely existing, eating only enough to keep his heart beating and hardly ever more than that. I could have stolen blood, Nezumi. I could have done what you did. Do you think I didn’t consider it many times? But every time, I decided the risk of attracting Vamp Hunters was too great, so I didn’t do anything.”

            “Karan, I took every precaution – ”

            “I know, honey. I’m not telling you to be ashamed of your actions. I’m not telling you that what you did was wrong. I’m telling you what I did was wrong. I let my own son starve for twenty years – ”

            “You didn’t – ”

            “Do not lie to me to comfort me. I am not an old woman who needs comforting. I need to acknowledge what I’ve done, and I need to tell someone, and I want to tell you because I just don’t know how I will ever be able to apologize to Shion. I’m sorry, Nezumi. I’m so sorry. I thought making sure Shion could live a lifetime, even a lifetime of starvation, was more important than risking the attraction of Vamp Hunters for a chance that Shion might live fully and happily and healthily. I tried to keep him safe, and I let myself push out of my mind how much pain Shion was in every day, how much he was suffering. When he got older, he started being able to hide it better. How weak he was. How hard it was to get through the day without collapsing. You are a beautiful actor, Nezumi, second only I think to my son. He acted so I wouldn’t see how terrible it was to starve, but I knew better than to let myself believe this act. I knew better.”

            “Karan, stop. You are an incredible mother. You have nothing to be ashamed of or to apologize for. You kept him alive. You kept him safe.”

            Karan’s voice rose now, anger there where it hadn’t been before. “I let myself believe every blood supplier we found for him would be enough. And every time they closed down, or the prices got too high for us to afford, I acted surprised, but how could I have been? Time and time again there wasn’t enough blood, and for his whole life, I thought it would be like this, that we were cursed for it to be like this, and then you change everything for him. Do you understand how much you’ve changed? You haven’t only taken away his hunger, but his pain and his fear of starvation and his worry over where he might get blood next, his uncertainty of when the next time he’ll eat will be. You did that, and I was angry with you. I told you you’d put him in danger. I yelled at you and said you might as well have reported him, you might as well have executed him yourself. I said those words to you, that you might as well have killed him.”          

            “You were worried, I don’t need you to apologize for that, especially not to me – ”

            “Not to you? You have let Shion experience life without sacrifices. I was never able to give him that. I never thought the risk was worth giving him that.”

            There was a pause. Shion hugged the bag of cupcake liners tightly against himself. He wanted to go into the kitchen and hug his mother instead, but stayed where he was, listened when Nezumi finally broke the silence.

            “Shion would hate that you’d ever apologize for anything you’ve done in raising him. I don’t know a lot about mothers, but I know a lot about sacrifice, and you’ve given Shion everything.”

            “I never gave him a whole hospital of blood,” Karan whispered.

            “Do you know why I attended Shion’s lectures a year ago? Why I kept going? It was his stupid smile. You know how he grins like an idiot? You gave him that. You gave him a life of happiness when he had every reason to be miserable and bitter and angry at the world. He was never any of that, and I know that’s because he had you.” There was a small silence, and when Nezumi spoke again, his voice was lower, and Shion had to lean closer to the door. “I think if I had you growing up, I might not have been any of that either.”

            “Oh, honey. You have me now. You know that, right?”

            “I know that,” Nezumi said quietly.

            Shion stepped away from the kitchen. Went back to the storage cupboard, rested the cupcake liners on the shelf, and leaned against it.

            He would give Nezumi a little longer with his mother. He’d had her his whole life – it was the least he could do, to pretend to look for cupcake liners for five minutes more.

*

Now that Shion had classes and Nezumi had shows on top of rehearsals, they were not often at the bakery at the same times anymore. So on the Wednesday in mid-September that marked three and a half weeks since the blood heist, Nezumi was alone with Safu in the kitchen. He was icing a cake – getting his arm back into the motions of icing that he’d been out of practice with for months – and Safu was whisking a combination of ingredients in a bowl.

            Nezumi put down his icing bag after half a rose, shook out his sore hand.

            “You going to be mad at me forever?” he asked.

            Safu didn’t stop whisking. “Are you going to be around forever?”

            “Planning on it.”

            “What happens in a year then?” Safu said, putting down her whisk and pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “He runs out of that blood, what then? You steal more?”

            Nezumi stopped shaking out his hand. “It worked the first time.”

            “You got lucky. It shouldn’t have worked. Shion should be dead right now because of you, but you got away with it, and now you’re cocky, and you’ll do it again and again and again until you get caught, right? That’s the plan? And until then, we’re all supposed to praise you and love you for swooping into our sad lives and waving your magic wand and making everything perfect. That’s my role in this, right? To thank you for being our savoir? Our knight in shining fucking armor?”

            “I certainly have never called myself that, but you’re free to do so if you’d like,” Nezumi said, smiling lightly, hoping Safu might relax, but she only stiffened.

            “You stole a whole hospital of blood. You are so full of yourself that you couldn’t just take half, you had to take it all, and now you think Vamp Hunters are just going to call it a day when they can’t track you down? They’ll never quit looking for you, and once they find you, they’ll find Shion, and trust me, Vamp Hunters aren’t going to be as smitten with your charm and silver eyes as everyone else is. They’ll kill Shion, and everyone is conveniently forgetting all of that because right now, he’s finally healthy. What does it matter how healthy he is if he’s going to be executed any day now?”

            Nezumi did not usually consider Safu a melodramatic person. She was incredibly realistic. She was rational and reasonable and calm, and even now, her voice was even, level, her gaze steady on Nezumi.

            He understood that she wasn’t exaggerating. This was the truth that she believed.

            He leaned forward, rested his hands on the counter on either side of the cake he’d been icing. “Safu. I would never put him in danger. I thought of everything before I took that blood.”

            Safu gave a sharp exhale that almost sounded like a laugh. “That’s the problem. You think you’re the smartest man in the universe, you think no one will ever be able to catch up to you and your clever plan, you don’t realize that you can be _wrong_ , Nezumi. You can be wrong, and if you are, maybe you’re losing your boyfriend of, what, a few months? I’m losing my best friend of my whole life. Karan is losing the only family she has left. He’s not yours to lose, I know you think he is, but he’s not, he’s mine and he’s Karan’s, yet you’re the one who risked his life. We’re the ones who’ll lose everything, and you’ve gone through that, I know, but that doesn’t mean you have to put everyone else through it too.”

            Safu still spoke calmly, but her voice was harder, sharper, and her eyes were bright now, wet.

            Nezumi couldn’t think of anything he could say to her. Her words rang in his head. _He’s not yours to lose._

            He tried to keep his own voice as calm as hers. “You won’t lose him, I promise.”

            “Promises don’t mean anything. We’re not children, Nezumi, you cannot placate me with a promise.” Safu picked up her whisk again, resumed her steady churning of whatever it was she was making.

            Nezumi didn’t ask her. He returned to his roses, icing slowly to avoid cramping the muscles of his wrist again.

            He knew the only thing that would gain him back Safu’s trust was time, and as of now, Nezumi had time to give her.

*

There was a woman in Shion’s Thursday lecture who was not his student. Shion knew this for several reasons.

            The woman was older than most of the students, like Nezumi had been, but unlike Nezumi, she was much older. Fifties, maybe, and while of course there were a few students in their fifties enrolled at the University of Tokyo, they tended to be more noticeable than students not in their fifties. Shion would have noticed this woman before, but he hadn’t.

            It was the woman’s first time in Shion’s lecture, and she was sitting in the very first row. She was not taking notes – a point very obvious because of her front row seat, and Shion could easily see her lack of notebooks or pens or pencils or a laptop or any type of device with which to take notes.

            The one thing she did have was a phone. She held it up on its side against the desk, camera facing Shion, and had it there for the whole lecture so that after Shion dismissed the students at the end of the class, he felt compelled to walk over to her.

            “Hi, I just wanted to let you know that we have a no recording policy at the University. It says so in the syllabus.”

            Shion waited for the woman to let him know she was not recording him. Instead, she stood up and held the phone out closer to Shion’s face, and he stepped back, alarmed.

            “Excuse me – ”

            “I never got a syllabus,” the woman said. She lowered the phone, pressed something on the screen, slipped it in her purse, and followed the other students that were sheparding themselves out the lecture hall.

            Shion stared at her back until students were behind her, blocking her from view. She’d been short, and Shion couldn’t even see the top of her head when she was lost amongst the students.

            He didn’t follow her. He thought it might be a terrible idea to follow her. His stomach tightened, and he tried to even out his breaths. He was overreacting. She could have been anyone.

            Shion told himself this as he packed his own backpack, left the lecture hall, walked quickly back to his apartment. His Thursday lecture was a night lecture, and he could have gone to the bakery to help close up, but he didn’t want to draw this woman to his mother.

            He locked his apartment door behind him, texted Nezumi, who would be in the middle of a show.

            _Don’t come over tonight._

            He went through his kitchen next, making sure his blood was properly hidden – most of the stash stayed at Nezumi’s place in his secret closet-within-a-closet, but Nezumi brought over a week’s supply for Shion every Sunday.

            He was in the bathroom checking his scar was covered everywhere when his phone buzzed on the sink. Nezumi was calling, and Shion pressed the speaker button.

            “Did you get my text?”

            “What’s going on?” Nezumi asked.

            “I don’t know. There was a woman…” Shion didn’t want to worry Nezumi if it was nothing. But it hadn’t been nothing. She’d definitely been recording him.

            “What woman? Shion?”

            Shion examined his face in the mirror, made sure his eyes were perfectly brown. Leaned closer and looked at his eyelashes and eyebrows, searching for white that he could pluck.

            “At my lecture. She was sitting in the front row, and I think she was recording me on her phone. I confronted her about it at the end of the lecture, and she didn’t deny it, and then she just left. I’ve never seen her before, and there was something unsettling about her.”

            “I’m coming over,” Nezumi said quickly.

            Shion nearly poked himself in the eye with his tweezers. “Don’t! The fact that she didn’t just seize me in the middle of my lecture means they don’t have absolute proof I’m a vamp, they’re just curious, checking me out. It must mean they know something about you, and they’ve seen you around me, and now I’m a suspect. They’re probably checking out all your cast members too, and my mom and Safu since you’re at the bakery so often. If we just lie low, maybe – ”

            There was the abrupt clatter of loud voices in the background on Nezumi’s end, and Shion stopped looking in the mirror, stared at his phone as if he could see Nezumi through it.

            “Nezumi?”

            “I have to go,” Nezumi’s voice was suddenly rushed, urgent. “Get that gun Safu gave you and go to her place now and get rid of your phone and anything you have that will connect you to me.”

            “What? What’s going on?” Shion shouted. There was more yelling on Nezumi’s line, something muffled, Shion couldn’t make it out, and then Nezumi’s voice, a harsh whisper.

            “Do what I said and don’t come looking for me and stay alive. You have to stay alive, Shion, will you do that for me?”

            The call dropped, nearly cutting off the end of Nezumi’s question. Shion grabbed his phone, pressed hard on his darkened screen as if he could bring back the call. “Shit, Nezumi!”

            His heart was in his throat. He made himself think. His phone was his only way of hearing back from Nezumi, but that was probably why Nezumi wanted him to get rid of it. Shion was betting Nezumi had just been grabbed by Tokyo authorities. Shion didn’t know about phones and the way they connected, if authorities could track Shion’s phone through Nezumi’s, if there was some kind of link like that, but he trusted Nezumi’s advice.

            Shion sent a quick text to his mother and Safu –

            _Dispose of your phones as soon as you get this message, I think Nezumi’s caught and they have his and could track us. I’m getting rid of mine so don’t try to call me._

            Shion set his phone on his sink counter next. It lit up almost immediately with a call from Safu, but Shion didn’t pick it up. He looked around his bathroom, found nothing, went to his kitchen and grabbed a knife and took it to the bathroom and smashed the handle of it against his phone.

            The phone didn’t crack. Shion picked it up and threw it hard into his bathtub, and the screen of it splintered, then, glass rocketing around the tub. Shion grabbed his phone, careful of the glass shards, set it back on the counter, and smashed it again with the knife handle, again and again, then took it to the kitchen, put it in a plastic bag, threw it in his backpack.

            He took the backpack to the bathroom. First cleaned the glass from his tub as quickly as he could, then threw all of his hair dye and foundation and contacts into his backpack. He went to the kitchen for his blood, threw it in his backpack next, and last, he opened his nightstand drawer.

            The gun was pushed to the very back of it. Shion reached for it, picked it up carefully. His palm sweat immediately upon holding it. A few days after the blood heist, Nezumi had suggested Shion get a gun, and Shion had told him about the one Safu had already gotten him. Nezumi had taken it out the drawer, sat beside Shion on the edge of the bed and shown Shion how to use it, how to load it and unlock the safety and lock the safety again.

            It had looked so secure in Nezumi’s hand, even though it’d been before his cast was taken off and he’d had to hold it in his left hand. Nezumi looked like he’d used one before, and Shion had even asked him, and Nezumi had laughed.

            _Of course not, professor, what do you think I was up to before I met you? I only know how to use it because I learned early on it’s important to know how to defend yourself._

            Shion made sure the safety was on, then stuck it in his backpack. If he was accosted on the street going from his apartment to Safu’s, the items in the backpack would be incriminating, but Shion’s own body was incriminating. He had to get the items out of his apartment in case it was searched.        

            Shion quickly went through his apartment looking for Nezumi’s possessions – he stuffed Nezumi’s clothing in his backpack, Nezumi’s phone charger as if they could somehow trace Nezumi from that, Nezumi’s toothbrush as if they might test it and find Nezumi’s DNA, Nezumi’s conditioner and deodorant and the exfoliating face wash he liked and the hairbands he’d left lying on the edge of the sink, as if these might otherwise have been the damning evidence that Nezumi had been here. Shion remembered to clean the shower drain of Nezumi’s long hair and flushed that.

            Shion left only Nezumi’s food items, and his books. He peeked out his apartment door before going into the hallway, locking the door behind him, walking quickly and taking the stairs, trying not to run down them. Outside his apartment building, he tried not to sprint across the street, to Safu’s building. In his apartment after Nezumi’s call, he’d felt almost numb, rigidly calm, but outside the walls of his apartment hot panic pulsed through him. He tried not to rush to Safu’s door after getting into her building, but he was out of breath when he made it there, taking out his key and struggling to unlock it with his hand shaking violently and letting himself in and closing the door behind him and gasping as he locked it again.

            “Shion?”

            Shion shrugged off his bulging backpack right before Safu ran out of the kitchen and hugged him. She squeezed him tight, let him go, kept her hands on his shoulders and examined him.

            “How do you know they caught Nezumi?”

            Shion spoke as quickly as he could between his ragged breaths. “I don’t. We were talking on the phone and there were voices behind him and he started talking fast, telling me to rid my apartment of everything that was his and dispose of my phone and get the gun and come to your place.”

            Safu nodded, picking up Shion’s backpack with one hand and pulling Shion farther into her apartment with the other. Her voice and presence and hand in Shion’s soothed him, and he felt his breaths evening as he listened to her.

            “I was at Karan’s after work, and she was up front while I was baking. She came in the kitchen a little before close and told me a man had been sitting at a corner table for a few hours, just watching her. I thought someone was following me too, after work when I headed to Karan’s, but I wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid.”

            “There was a woman in my lecture,” Shion admitted. “Recording me on her phone.”

            “They don’t know it’s you. They only know about Nezumi, or they’d have taken you already as well.”

            Safu had led Shion to her bed, sat him on the edge of it, and he was relieved to be off his legs, hadn’t realized how weak they felt.

            “What will they do to him?” Shion asked.

            Safu sat beside him. “He’s not a vamp. They’ll obviously screen him, and he’ll obviously pass. So they won’t kill him immediately. They’ll know he’s a link to a vamp, so they’ll keep him alive to try to find you through him. They might torture him to get information out of him.”

            Safu spoke calmly, but her hand was around Shion’s, and she was squeezing tightly. So tightly, Shion worried she’d break his skin, release his poison.

            “Safu, you have to loosen your grip,” he said quietly. He regretted saying it. The pain of her fingernails had been a distraction from her words. _They won’t kill him immediately. They might torture him._

            “Sorry,” she whispered.

            “Where’s my mom?”

             “Karan is still at the bakery, and I think she should stay there, if she comes here it might be too obvious. They might have followed me here anyway, or followed you after you left your apartment to come here. It’s not safe, but going anywhere isn’t safe.”

             “We have to do something, we can’t just hide. If they’re torturing him – ”

            Safu shook her head firmly. “You can’t do anything. You have to stay here. The gun is in your backpack, right?”

            “Safu, I can’t – ”

            “When the moment comes, that’s when you have to decide. Let’s not talk about that right now. If Nezumi’s smart, and he is, he’ll say he doesn’t know any vamps personally, that he just stole the blood to supply it to vamps online. He’ll pretend to just be a vamp sympathizer, or better yet, just someone with good business sense out to monopolize on the plight of vamps. He’s smart, Shion, and he’s a good actor. We have to trust him.”

            “You don’t trust him!” Shion shouted. He knew none of this was Safu’s fault. He knew he shouldn’t shout at her, but she was speaking so calmly, saying things like _They might torture him_ without any hesitance or doubt that Shion couldn’t help himself from shouting at her.

            It didn’t help that she’d been convinced this would happen. Shion had let himself start to feel safe, but Safu had never dropped her anger at Nezumi, her almost aggressive insistence that stealing the blood would lead them to this. She had been right, and Shion hated her for it.

            “Yes, I do. Robbing the hospital was a stupid and horrible thing to do, and I won’t praise him for it, but I understand that he did it because you were starving, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. Right now, his head should be clear. He is good at surviving, Shion, and I trust him to do so, and I trust him to keep you safe now that his judgment is no longer clouded as it was before.”

            Shion inspected his friend. Her eyes were wide and her hands were clenched around the bedsheets, and Shion knew panic when he saw it, had seen it all over Nezumi for weeks.

            “You’re just pretending not to be worried for my sake, aren’t you?”

            Safu exhaled deeply. “I’m not doing a good job, am I?” she asked weakly.

            “Sure, you are.”

            Safu forced a smile, and Shion tried to force one back, but wasn’t sure he was successful.

            There was nothing left to do but wait, but Shion didn’t even know what he was waiting for.

*

It was Ophelia, that got Nezumi caught.

            He’d sung for Tao Fukushima, his fake fiancé, in the hospital. He hadn’t sung Ophelia’s song, but even so, a neurosurgeon who’d heard Nezumi in the hospital had been at one of _Hamlet’s_ shows and recognized Nezumi’s voice. He’d immediately called authorities.

            The Vamp Hunter who’d handcuffed Nezumi and led him into the back of her car explained this to him, even though Nezumi hadn’t asked. He couldn’t ask. There was thick black tape over his mouth.

            “I have a ticket for one of your shows next week. Do you think it’ll be refunded? I only got it for you, I saw one of your plays last year. You were brilliant in it. Had an immediate fan in me,” the Vamp Hunter said. Her name was Momoe. She’d informed Nezumi of this while she’d handcuffed him, smiling as if she wasn’t handcuffing him at all.

            Momoe had put Nezumi’s seatbelt on him after guiding him into the backseat of her car while cheerfully exclaiming _Safety first!_ As she’d done so, Nezumi had considered headbutting her or bringing his knees up sharply into her stomach, or both, then running. She was small and young, reminded Nezumi of his peppy neighbor that Shion apparently liked. Momoe could have been a teenager, and Nezumi could easily have overpowered her even in handcuffs.

            He could not so easily have overpowered the three men and two women in the car behind Momoe’s, all of whom had guns. Momoe did not have a gun, which Nezumi found strange. Maybe it was so that Nezumi couldn’t take it from her. He had no idea why he was in her car and not the car with the three men and two women who all looked like body builders.

            Momoe glanced back between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s, then laughed. “Oh! I forgot I gagged you, I was wondering why you weren’t answering.”

            Nezumi tilted his head back against the headrest.

            “Well, it’s two tickets to get refunded actually. I bought one for my father as well. I’m trying to reconnect with him, but I don’t truly know if he likes the theater. Since Mom died, he’s been distant. Thinking back, we never really were close, but Mom made it seem that way. She was the bridge between us, and now we’re both left trying to teach ourselves to swim,” Momoe mused from the driver’s seat, sounding wistful.

            Nezumi closed his eyes. He found himself thankful, in that moment, for Shion and all his ridiculous ramblings. It had given Nezumi practice tuning out nonsense, and he needed to think, now, on how the hell to get himself out of this car and make sure Shion was okay.

            The drive was short, and by the end of it, Nezumi’s plan was still loose, unspecific – get the keys to the handcuffs, free himself, get a gun, get out, find Shion.

            Momoe parked the car in front of a large white building with bold black lettering across the top – _Japanese Bureau of Vampire Investigation and Control._ Nezumi had only seen the JBVIC building in magazine and newspaper photos. It was, of course, in Tokyo, but Nezumi had never given it much thought.

            Momoe was abruptly blocking his view of the building, then opening Nezumi’s car door.

            “You look alert, I thought you were sleeping!” she exclaimed, leaning into the car to unbuckle Nezumi’s seatbelt, and Nezumi thought about all the things he could do to her, but he could hear the car pulling up behind her, knew it was filled with the body building Vamp Hunters.

            He could take this Momoe hostage. He had to get the handcuffs off first. He had already tried pulling his hands through them, but they were absurdly tight around his wrists. Heavy, too, a strange kind of metal that was bulky and thick and hadn’t looked like normal handcuffs in the glimpse Nezumi had gotten of them before Momoe had snapped them on his wrists.

            Momoe pulled Nezumi up out of the car, her hand dainty around his upper arm. The body builders were getting out of their car as well, guns pointed at Nezumi from the moment the car doors opened.

            “This way, I’ll give you the grand tour,” Momoe said happily.

            Nezumi scrutinized the girl leading him to the building. He didn’t want to underestimate her. It was more than possible she was well-versed in martial arts, or some other kind of violence that could disarm Nezumi when he tried to attack her. She looked frail, though, and Nezumi almost wanted to ask her why he was with her and not the body builders.

            Not that they were far. Nezumi could hear them following him and Momoe to the building, a few feet behind.

            Regardless, Nezumi couldn’t ask anything with the tape over his mouth. Momoe had leaned close enough when she’d applied it to his lips that Nezumi had been able to smell her perfume, a honey-scented aroma.

            Momoe led Nezumi through the building, truly giving him a tour, starting at the bottom floor and taking him up, floor by floor, to the top floor where she stopped at a keypad-locked door.

            “And this room is where we keep the pre-screened prisoners. Like you! Not that you have to worry, you’re obviously not a vamp. Which is good because like you just saw, the vamp vault is not a fun place to be.”

            Momoe pulled Nezumi to the side, and one of the body builders stepped up, typed a code in the keypad with his hand cupping around the side of it so Nezumi couldn’t see what he typed, and then the door buzzed and unlocked.

            Momoe led Nezumi in. The walls looked concrete and were windowless, and the room was otherwise empty but for a line of chairs in the center, seated side by side.

            The chairs also looked concrete and had thick chains hanging off the sides of their arms. There was eleven of them. Momoe led Nezumi to the one in the very center, guided him to sit on the edge of it, his arms still handcuffed against his lower back. The exceptional weight of the cuffs pulled his arms down, and his shoulders were starting to strain.

            “I’ll have to inject you with a sedative now. Usually we do that right away, but you’re obviously from the Gin Dynasty, we all know you’re not a vamp. Even so, we have to screen you, it’s just a blood test, simple and painless. I’m sedating you so I can take off the handcuffs and strap you to the chair. It’s a quick sedation, you’ll be up in ten minutes.”

            Nezumi found it more likely that a Gin Dynasty survivor would be a vamp than a vamp sympathizer, seeing as the former was not generally by choice, but the tape prevented him from arguing, and he couldn’t come up with any sort of strategy to stop Momoe from sedating him before a body builder stepped forth, handed Momoe a syringe.

            Nezumi eyed it. Thought about the last time a syringe had been stuck in him. This one was not empty, but filled with clear liquid.

            Momoe touched Nezumi’s upper arm, and he jerked out of her grasp. She looked up at him, her expression startled.

            “You’re not going to cooperate?” she asked, sounding confused.

            Nezumi did not have to guess about the body builders. They were strong. They had guns. They were threats he understood and knew how to fight in the right circumstances.

            Momoe did not make sense. Nezumi did not bother looking at any of the body builders, who had all shuffled into the room after them and made a half-circle around the back of Momoe. He watched Momoe carefully.

            “It doesn’t hurt, I promise. Just a tiny stick,” Momoe said. She reached out for Nezumi’s arm again, and again, he jerked out of her grip. None of the body builders stepped forward. There were no guns to Nezumi’s head, as there had been when Momoe had handcuffed him outside the theater.

            Momoe tilted her head. Watched Nezumi back. “Are you scared?” she asked him.

            Nezumi could hear his own breaths, his inhales and exhales skating across the tape stretched over his upper lip. He kept them even, unrushed.

            Momoe reached out again. Hand on Nezumi’s arm, and again, he leaned out of her grip, and Momoe sighed.

            She could have grabbed him. She could have injected the contents of her syringe into him despite his resistance. It wasn’t any real resistance. Nezumi was handcuffed. She must have known she could have injected him anywhere, and there was very little he could do about it.

            But Momoe looked dejected. She let her hand holding the syringe fall to her side. She stepped away from Nezumi.

            “He’s being difficult,” she said to one of the body builders, sounding sad, almost whiny.

            The woman she spoke to stepped forward. Momoe was looking at Nezumi again, eyes scanning his body.

            “Maybe his shoulder? He has such nice shoulders though…”

            Nezumi could hear his own breaths quicken. He could get up and run. The keypadded door was closed, had locked behind them. He could lean back, use the chair he sat on to steady him as he lifted his legs and wrapped them around Momoe’s neck. She’d be his hostage, then, but she still held the syringe, could stick him with it in the leg. She gave no signs of being quick-witted, but she must have been to be a Vamp Hunter. They had to go through months of arduous mental and physical training. Momoe must have done all of that too.

            “If it’s his legs, then he won’t be able to walk, and we’ll have to carry him everywhere. That gets so tedious. Arm then? The right one, he’s right handed, he was holding his phone with his right hand when we saw him. Upper arm should do just fine, right there I think,” Momoe said, pointing, her fingertip touching Nezumi’s arm, and he flinched back again, this time instinctively.

            The body builder Momoe had chosen held up her gun. It was a large gun, a Vamp Hunter’s gun, designed specifically for them and not sold to the public. Momoe probably didn’t have one because it seemed doubtful she’d even be able to lift one.

            The Vamp Hunter pointed the gun at Nezumi’s arm. Momoe reached out for it, wrapped her small hand around the barrel, guided it closer to Nezumi.

            “Right up against his skin, I want it to touch him,” Momoe said.

            Nezumi slid back on the cement chair. The gun followed him. He could kick the Vamp Hunter, who was in reach of his legs now, but the woman held a goddamn gun to him. There were four other Vamp Hunters with guns pointed at him and a psychopath with a syringe right next to him.

            “The whole torture part usually comes later, but you were being difficult,” Momoe said, sounding disappointed. “Unless you were just scared. Sometimes people are just scared of needles. If you’re scared of needles, and not being insolent, then it wouldn’t be fair to shoot you. Right?”

            Nezumi glanced down at the gun. It was right against his arm. His hands were jammed between his back and the chair, cuffed in the heavy handcuffs. Nezumi understood the abnormally heavy cuffs were designed for vamps. A human didn’t stand a chance breaking out of them.

            Nezumi looked back at Momoe. He nodded jerkily. He couldn’t speak for the tape and he was glad for it, at that moment.

            “So you’re just scared?” Momoe asked. Her eyes lit up, as if the thought of Nezumi’s fear excited her, and her excitement had an oddly childish quality.

            Nezumi nodded again.

            “He says he’s scared,” Momoe said, to the body builder now.

            The body builder was watching Nezumi too. Her eyes were hard. There was no excitement in them at all.

            “I don’t like giving people more than three chances, but I’m a fan of yours, ever since _Oedipus Rex._ You’re such a lovely actor. I’ll give you another chance for that,” Momoe was saying, and Nezumi saw that she held up the syringe again.

            He didn’t move when she lifted it toward him. He didn’t flinch when her hand cupped his arm, and then the syringe pricked his skin, and he felt the slight burn of the injection.

            “I guess guns are scarier than needles, huh?” Momoe said, giggling, a child’s laugh, and Nezumi blinked at her, his eyelids heavy, his body heavy, and he was slumping to the side against the chained armrest, unable to keep himself upright.

            Almost instantly, Nezumi passed out.

*

Three hours after Shion had gotten the call from Nezumi and rushed to Safu’s, there was a knock on Safu’s door.

            It was midnight. Shion and Safu were wide awake, sitting on the edge of Safu’s bed.

            “Maybe it’s Mom,” Shion said, getting up, but Safu pulled his arm back, getting up beside him.

            “Stay here. Take this and go in the closet.” Safu had picked up the gun from the bed beside her, pushed it into Shion’s hands.

            He wanted to let it drop from his fingers, but held it reluctantly.

            “I’m the fifth floor, you’ll break your neck jumping out my window,” Safu was saying, while the knocking grew louder.

            “You shouldn’t answer it either.”      

            “Just stay here, or they’ll break down the door and barge in. I’ll try to lead them away, Vamp Hunters need warrants too, if they haven’t got one yet, I can buy us some time.”

            Safu left the room, then, and Shion went to the bedroom door she closed on him, opened it back just a slit so he could listen.

            He heard Safu speaking loudly before she opened the front door.

            “Who is it?”

            “Japanese Bureau of Vampire Investigation and Control. Open the door!”

            Shion could hardly hear over his own pulse. He heard Safu unlocking her door and opening it, and he glanced down at the gun he cradled to his chest with both hands.

            “Do you know what time it is? I have work in the morning,” Safu said roughly. Shion held his breath.

            “Ma’am, we have reason to suspect there is a vamp at this residence.”

            “What reason would that be?”

            “Are you the only resident at this address?”

            “Yes, I am a woman living alone, which means I have pepper spray, and I will use it on you if you try to step foot in my apartment without a warrant. Do you have a warrant?” Safu demanded.

            “Ma’am, there is no need to be hostile.”

            “It’s midnight and you’re slamming on my door telling me I’m a vamp! I think that’s enough reason to be hostile!”

            “As you should know, the seventh clause of the Vampire Control Act allows for level one screenings without a warrant. You will have to oblige, ma’am.”

            “Fine, do a level one screening on me, but you’re not coming into my home. You are a strange man and it’s the middle of the night and that is a very large gun you’re holding, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look out for my own safety.”

            “Of course, ma’am, that is not unreasonable at all. The JBVIC is always looking out for civilian safety.”

            “Fine. Screen me.”

            Shion listened to the silence that ensued. A level one screening was an eye test. They’d be checking Safu’s eyes for contacts, and if she wore them, having her take them out. But Safu didn’t wear contacts, and soon enough, the Vamp Hunter was speaking again.

            “Well, ma’am, I’m very pleased to tell you that you’ve passed the level one screening test. I will have to serve you these summoning papers, you’ve been identified as a possible affiliate of the blood heist operator of Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital on the twenty-third of August.”

            “Summoning papers?” Safu asked. Shion could hear the shuffle of paper even from down the hall.

            “An official request, ma’am, for you to undergo level three screening within the next twenty-four hours. If you do not oblige, you will be arrested by the government of Japan for obstruction of justice, a level three screening will be forced upon you, and you will be charged a large fine with possible jail time. I suggest, if you’ll allow me to say so, that you do oblige.”

            Safu was silent. Shion could imagine her reading whatever papers had summoned her to do this blood screening.

            “Ma’am, I’ll leave you to have a lovely night. Do stay safe, and keep that pepper spray you mentioned on hand. You are quite right to be cautious. There’s a vamp on the loose in Tokyo, after all.”

            The front door closed quietly, then, but Shion stayed in Safu’s room until she came to him, opening the bedroom door and jumping back.

            “You scared me,” she breathed, holding out the papers she held, and Shion took them.

            There were three documents, and Shion skimmed them, saw that in essence they said what the Vamp Hunter had said – Safu was requested to give a blood test to prove she wasn’t a vamp within the next twenty-four hours or risk arrest.

            “They must not have seen you come here, or they’d have insisted on searching the apartment even without a warrant, I’m sure of it. This is good news, it means they have no idea who the vamp is, they’re probably just making the rounds tonight to everyone Nezumi’s associated with and forcing level one screenings on them and serving them these requests for level three screenings. It could be worse,” Safu said. She took the papers back from Shion, flipped through them. “I’ll have to get this done, what a pain, it says I have to go all the way to Vamp Hunter headquarters. The ‘Japanese Bureau of Vampire Investigation and Control,’ what a useless euphemism, they might as well just call it the Vamp Extermination Bureau. At least it’s still in Tokyo.”

            “Nezumi might be there,” Shion said, and Safu glanced up at him.

            “At headquarters? Most likely.”

            “I’ll come with you tomorrow when you get your blood test.”         

            Safu’s expression hardened instantly. “First of all, you’re not leaving this apartment. They’re probably at your place right now, knocking and waiting to give you your own screening summons, and when you don’t answer, they’re going to be looking for you. You have to stay hidden.”

            “I don’t care – ”

            “Second of all,” Safu interrupted loudly, pointing the papers at Shion, “the last place you need to ever step foot in is Vamp Hunter headquarters. Are you even thinking, Shion? We’ve spent our whole lives keeping you away from Vamp Hunters, and now you want to just waltz right into their – ”

            “They have Nezumi,” Shion said, and his voice was even harder than Safu’s, even angrier.

            He didn’t care if Safu argued with him all night. He didn’t care if he was safer in this apartment. He didn’t care that Nezumi had told him to stay alive, and to go to Vamp Hunter headquarters was to risk his life more recklessly than anything he’d ever done.

            Nezumi was likely being hurt, tortured, and Shion understood, in that moment, why Nezumi had stolen nearly every bag of blood from the hospital. He understood, in that moment, that Nezumi had done so to prevent Shion from undergoing any more starvation, any more pain.

            Shion, too, would do anything to save Nezumi from pain. Shion, too, would risk everything, to get Nezumi home safe.

*


	21. Chapter 21

Momoe wiped her fingers on her black shirt, where Nezumi’s blood didn’t show up red, but a darker shade of black.

            “He looks like he’s going to pass out again, let’s take a break,” Momoe said happily, glancing back at her crew of body building Vamp Hunters, guns at their sides.

            Nezumi kept his eyes open until Momoe had flounced out the new room he’d been taken into after passing his screening – it was identical to the previous room but that there was only one chair in the very center of it. This chair was the same heavy cement that seemed built into the floor, but the chains on its arms were not nearly as thick. They were not vamp-proof, but still human-proof, and Nezumi could not get out of them despite his efforts.

            He didn’t know how long he’d been trying to get out of them. There was no clock in the room. There was nothing but Nezumi until Momoe came in with the troop of armed Vamp Hunters behind her and asked him sweetly, _Do you want to tell the truth now, Nezumi?_

            When Nezumi was silent, she did not have the body builders use their guns on Nezumi. She instead requested a gun from one of them to use herself and struck Nezumi with it. It was heavy, and Nezumi had not even expected her to be able to lift it, but she swung it with surprising force. Nezumi suspected the guns were made out of concrete as well, or something as brutal as it. Something that, when it hit Nezumi’s flesh, had his blood splattering into his own eyes, into Momoe’s face, against her teeth when she smiled, like she was a vamp herself, but she wasn’t.     

            She hated vamps. She told Nezumi this herself. She asked Nezumi why he didn’t hate vamps too. Why he would steal blood for vamps. Why he would keep the identity of vamps a secret.

            _Didn’t they take everything from you? Didn’t they kill your family right in front of you? Didn’t you have a sister? It says in our files you had a sister. It says in our files vamps killed your sister. It says in our files she was only four years old. So young, an innocent life slaughtered. Weren’t you the big brother? Weren’t you supposed to take care of her? Didn’t your parents trust you to take care of her?_

Nezumi did not know what time it was, or what day it was, but he knew Momoe had come into the room twice. No one else came into the room. Nezumi had wet himself at one point, unable to hold it any longer. He was not brought any food. He smelled of blood and piss and sweat. His bangs were in his eyes and he couldn’t push them out of the way with his hands strapped down. A leather band was wrapped around his chest, keeping him against the back of the cement chair.

            Nezumi’s mouth was no longer taped, but Nezumi did not scream. He didn’t make a sound at all, not even to lie, not even to create some sort of story that could make Momoe stop, that could make her go away.

            He knew he had to come up with a plan, he knew he had to get himself out, he knew he had to find out where Shion was and if he’d been caught yet and how he could get to Shion whether or not Shion had been caught yet, but whenever Momoe was in the room, she had a way of talking about things Nezumi had never let himself think about. She had a way of making the air empty from his lungs completely, of making Nezumi’s throat close up so he couldn’t speak a word.

            _What would your dynasty say if they knew you were stealing blood for vamps? What would your father say? What would your mother say? Do you think she’d be proud of you, Nezumi, for what you’ve done? I think she’d be really sad. I think she’d wonder how you grew up to be such a disappointment. First you let her die and you let your little baby sister die just so you could get out alive, and now you side with those that killed her. Do you even regret it, Nezumi? Are you even sorry?_

            She talked endlessly and struck him over and over and Nezumi couldn’t speak, and then when she left, took her childish voice with her, Nezumi still wouldn’t stop hearing it for as long as his fresh wounds stung, like her voice and the pain were inseparable, never one without the other. And every time the pain ebbed enough for him to be able to think clearly again, Momoe was back, like she knew the exact moment to return, like she could read Nezumi’s mind.

            But Momoe couldn’t read his mind. Nezumi knew that. He knew she was using some kind of psychological warfare, she was just getting in his head, with her honey-scented perfume and her childish giggling and her sweet voice and the way she talked to him, casually and happily, shooting him grins before she struck him again with the butt of the gun.

            Nezumi knew she was just a human trained to find vamps and kill them. He knew he could outlast her. He knew he could outsmart her.

            It got harder to remember that as the time slipped by, time Nezumi couldn’t keep track of, but however much time it was, Nezumi knew he had endured much worse than this psychotic girl. If hundreds of vamps couldn’t kill him, he could survive this too.

*

According to the Vamp Hunter at the receptionist desk of the screening wing at Vamp Hunter headquarters, Shion was not allowed to accompany Safu to the room where they took her to get her blood test.

            “No one goes back there without summoning papers. You can stay in the waiting room,” she said, without even looking up at Shion from the novel she was reading.

            The screening wing was set up like a doctor’s office, and Shion stayed in the waiting room for half a minute after Safu had been called back for her blood test.

            Then Shion got up. Left the waiting room into the white marble-floored hall of Vamp Hunter headquarters, which Safu had walked him through quickly, following the many signs pointing to the screening wing. She was not happy Shion had come, but Shion didn’t particularly care.

            There was no directory of the building, and the only signs around were ones pointing Shion back in the direction of the screening wing. He guessed the screening wing was the only place where the public was welcome. Every other part of the large headquarters was for Vamp Hunters, and the vamps they caught.

            The execution room, Shion knew, was in the basement. They called it the vamp vault. Shion wasn’t sure how he knew this. It was just common knowledge – vamps were executed in the basement of Vamp Hunter headquarters. The ways they were executed were not released to the public. There were rumors – guns or injections or gruesome torture or just starvation. Shion thought starvation seemed unlikely. It took a long time for a vamp to starve to death. It felt more likely that Vamp Hunters preferred to rush the process, to the give the public immediate relief in knowing another vamp was dead and the world was one vamp closer to complete vamp extermination.

            Shion found a stairwell. The screening wing was on the first floor, so Shion climbed up. He had no desire to go near the vamp vault in the basement. He was waiting for a Vamp Hunter to leap out at him, but thus far, he’d only see one – the receptionist in the screening wing, who’d asked Safu to present her papers and then write her name on a clipboard even though there were no other people in the waiting room.

            The receptionist had a Vamp Hunter’s gun leaning against her chair. Shion had never seen one up close. It was as large as an arm, as thick as half a tree trunk.

            Shion didn’t think the gun was necessary. A vamp would never willingly come into Vamp Hunter headquarters to get screened. Even if summoned with papers like Safu had been, a vamp would choose the “not obliging” option. It should have been clear that the fact that Safu had even come here was proof that she wasn’t a vamp, but Shion didn’t have time to question the methods of Vamp Hunters.

            He had to figure out where Nezumi was, and he had absolutely no plan, but there was no way to form one. Information on Vamp Hunter headquarters was not released to the public. There was no way to find out the layout of the place, or any statistics on the staff, or any information at all regarding the establishment.

            Shion had thought Nezumi reckless for breaking into the hospital, but Nezumi had done research. Shion had not. He was fully aware of this, and this did not prevent him from proceeding without a plan anyway.

            Shion left the stairwell on the second floor, walked cautiously along the thin hallway that led off the stairwell. Doors lined the hallway, and Shion listened at each one he passed but could hear no voices from inside any of them.

            At the end of the hallway, Shion spun around, confused. An entire floor couldn’t be made up of one straight, narrow hallway. The building was huge, Shion had gaped at it from the window of the Uber he and Safu had taken from the subway station. It was a colossal white, bulky concrete mass with black lettering on the top, and Shion had seen it before, of course, on the news and post cards and folders that some of his students brought to class. It was a national monument. It was a landmark. There were only ten Vamp Hunter headquarters worldwide, and the largest was the JBVIC in Tokyo. Tokyo was not the city of the Great Slaughter, but it had been decided that the Japanese headquarters would make better sense alongside other government buildings.

            Shion backtracked down the hallway. He tried to open each door that he passed, but they were all locked with keypads. Soon enough, Shion found himself back at the door to the stairwell, the only door not keypadded. He let himself through and went to the third floor.

            Shion wasn’t sure how many floors were in the building, but he got to the seventh before an alarm went off. Red lights began to blink and swirl rapidly around the hallway Shion had found himself in.

            Shion pressed himself against the wall of the hallway. Stared up at the ceilings, but he couldn’t see any cameras, hadn’t seen any cameras at all the entire time. Maybe they were hidden from view. Maybe Shion had set off some sort of trip wire. Maybe the alarms had nothing to do with him at all, maybe they had to do with Nezumi, but then there was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker –

            _Unidentified individual on floor seven, hallway C. All doors and stairways on lockdown without special clearance code. Unidentified individual on floor seven, hallway C. All doors and stairways on lockdown without special clearance. Unidentified individual on floor seven, hallway C…_

            Shion sprinted back to the stairway, tried the door that hadn’t even seemed to have a lock a minute before, but it wouldn’t budge now.

            “Shit,” he whispered, staring around him, then running back along the hall, into another hall – floor seven, unlike the second floor, had many hallways, and Shion was soon lost in the maze of them, trying every door he could until one opened right as he reached for it.

            A gun was pressed to his chest, and Shion immediately backed up until the opposite wall of the hallway pressed against his back, stopping him. Shion didn’t have his gun. Civilian guns weren’t allowed in Vamp Hunter headquarters.

            The Vamp Hunter pinning Shion against the wall with his gun was stocky and dark-skinned with thick black hair and wrinkles around eyes that looked kind, despite the gun to Shion’s chest. Not Japanese. Indian, maybe, and when he spoke, his Japanese was accented in a foreign way, but perfectly fluent.

            “I recognize your face,” the Vamp Hunter said.

            “Do we know each other?” Shion asked, blinking, and at this, the Vamp Hunter looked startled, then laughed suddenly, the barrel of the gun vibrating on Shion’s chest.

            The Vamp Hunter was human. Shion had vamp strength. He had never used it intentionally, consciously, but he was certain he could.

            “That was a good joke. No, no, I do not know you. You’re on the list. An established affiliate of the blood heist culprit and therefore having possible affiliations with vamps. We’ve been looking for you. You haven’t been home lately, Shion.”

            Shion kept his hands by his sides. He tried to think of what Nezumi would do in this situation. He could grab the gun and move it away from his chest, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be quick enough to move it before the Vamp Hunter shot him. He could use his vamp strength on this Vamp Hunter, but he thought he should probably get the gun away from his chest before he did anything. He wasn’t sure what he’d do after the gun was away from his chest. Hit the man? Knock him out?

            “I’m here for a vamp screening,” Shion finally said. “I was summoned.”

            “The screening wing is on the ground floor. You couldn’t have missed the signs. They’re everywhere.”

            There was no way to deny this. There had, indeed, been an almost absurd number of signs pointing to the screening wing, guiding Safu and Shion even from the parking lot the very moment they’d gotten out of the Uber and taken a few seconds to look at the large white headquarter building in person, looming before them, bigger than it had ever seemed on t-shirts, or mugs, or calendars, or keychains.

            “You understand, I can’t just let you go to the screening wing like any civilian. You’ll have to be taken as a prisoner, and screened as a hostile individual would be.”

            “I’m not hostile,” Shion said. He made sure to speak calmly. He did not want this man to know that he planned on moving the gun from his own chest and knocking the Vamp Hunter out.

            “Backup!” the Vamp Hunter shouted abruptly, and before Shion could move the gun from his chest, before he could use his vamp strength intentionally for the first time in his life, doors burst open along the hallway on his left and right, and soon the hall was filled with Vamp Hunters, and their large guns, and all of them were pointed at Shion.

            Shion pressed himself as flat as he could against the wall behind him. It was thick, solid. If he wanted to break it, even with vamp strength, he wasn’t entirely sure that he could. Most of Vamp Hunter headquarters, Shion knew, had been built with a special kind of concrete. Meant to be vamp-proof.

            “The pre-screening room for prisoners is on the top floor,” the original Vamp Hunter said. “You should lead the way.”

            Shion did not want to lead the way. He wasn’t familiar with this building. He knew nothing about the layout. He could not turn in any direction without being faced with more guns.

            But the Vamp Hunter who’d found him first nudged the gun harder into Shion’s chest, so Shion pivoted towards the stairwell he’d come from.

            He couldn’t even see the door to the stairwell. Vamp Hunters filled the entire hall. They were large, tall and muscular, and Shion knew they’d undergone training more rigorous than any military.

            Shion didn’t know why they underwent such strenuous training. Against a vamp, none of them could survive. It was the guns that made them deadlier. It was the guns that made Shion walk forward – into more guns, but the Vamp Hunters in front of him stepped back with each step Shion made forward, and the Vamp Hunters behind him followed.

            They were a slow-moving mass. Shion felt a gun between his shoulder blades. He wondered if this was how they’d caught Nezumi too, if this was how they’d escorted him. Nezumi would have been caught outside the theater, or maybe he hadn’t left yet, maybe he’d called Shion from his dressing room. Maybe a swarm of Vamp Hunters had accosted him there, knocking over the make-up on his dresser and the costume racks and the flowers given to him by fans who adored him and the little green plush rat Shion had bought him after seeing it at the dollar store where he got his toilet cleaner.

            “Elevator,” a Vamp Hunter behind Shion said, when Shion finally reached the stairwell door, and he was about to say he hadn’t seen any elevators, but the gun against his back nudged him to his left, so Shion stepped that way.

            He let the gun push him two more doors down, where a Vamp Hunter in front of Shion stopped, keyed numbers in a keypad that she blocked from Shion’s view. The door buzzed and slid open just like an elevator door would.

            “Oh,” Shion said quietly. He was pushed into the elevator, and several of the Vamp Hunters got in with him. The doors closed, and a Vamp Hunter pressed the top floor button on the wall.

            They rode in silence. Got out at the top floor, Shion again surrounded by the mass of Vamp Hunters that had fit in the elevator with him. This floor was not a narrow hallway, but much like the first floor – open and bright.

            “Is Nezumi in the pre-screening room?” Shion asked. He assumed, if these Vamp Hunters knew about him, they must know about Nezumi.

            “He’s been screened. He passed. He’s with Momoe now.”

            “Who’s Momoe?”

            They were at another keypadded door. Shion had no idea why there were so many doors in the building, what could be behind all of these doors.

            The bodies of vamps? Weight rooms for the Vamp Hunters to build their unnecessary muscle? Storage space for their massive guns?

            The door buzzed and clicked open. This room was empty but for a line of concrete chairs with chains across the very center. Shion stopped walking abruptly, and the gun jutting into his back nearly toppled him forward.

            He stumbled, regained his balance, made himself walk.

            He wondered how the chairs and chains and concrete walls had been tested. Certainly not by a vamp. How did the Vamp Hunters know their building was vamp-proof?

            “Sit,” a Vamp Hunter said, the same one who’d found Shion. He was holding a syringe now, and Shion stared at it for only a moment.

            “Who’s Momoe?” he asked again, sitting only because he was pushed.

            “I’m sure you’ll meet her yourself. This will knock you out for ten minutes. We’ll strap you into the chair and take a blood sample during that time.”

            “Why will I meet her? What is she doing with Nezumi? Who is she?” Shion demanded again, as his arm was grabbed.

            He could fight off this Vamp Hunter with his syringe, but he could not fight off the other Vamp Hunters who surrounded him with their guns.

            The Vamp Hunter beside Shion shoved the syringe into his arm, and Shion flinched. Heat flooded his arm from the injection, a burning feeling, and immediately, he felt his body go limp, his eyes close.

            Right before he passed out, he heard, as if from a great distance –

            “Momoe is the torturer.”

*

Nezumi had been unchained. It didn’t matter much, as he could barely move.

            Momoe tossed aside the gun she’d struck Nezumi across the face with. The skin of his jaw had split open on contact. Blood rushed out, and Nezumi lifted his hands to his face to catch it. It was hot over his skin.

            Nezumi pushed himself with his feet until he was against a wall. He needed the wall to keep him sitting upright, now that he didn’t have the chair, as Momoe had knocked him out of it.

            Momoe followed him. Crouched in front of him. Nezumi could hear nothing but his own breaths, chasing themselves out of him. His eyes were wet from the pain. He wasn’t sure where the pain was. Everywhere. He could no longer pinpoint it, block it into certain spaces of his body.

            From her back pocket, Momoe pulled out a silver square, like a lighter, except that with a flick of her fingers, a knife sprung out of it. It was small and sharp. Nezumi had not seen it before.

            “The silver matches your eyes,” Momoe said. She said it like a compliment. Like praise.

            Nezumi pressed his back hard against the wall behind him. He had not come up with a plan. He could not remember how many times Momoe had visited him. This was the third time, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. He hated that he wasn’t sure.

            Momoe tilted her head. She wore pigtails now, when before her hair had always been loose over her shoulders.

            “Do you want to say something now, Nezumi? You have such a lovely voice.”

            Nezumi swallowed. All that came down his throat was blood. It was thick and his mouth was full of it. He swallowed again so he wouldn’t choke. It was difficult to swallow. It was difficult to keep his head up. His hands were slimy and slick with his own blood. He was surprised by the amount he could bleed. The human body averaged eight to twelve pints of blood, Nezumi knew, he’d researched it, and Shion had told him so himself.

            Nezumi wondered how much blood was left in him. How much he’d lost. How much more he could lose until there was none left in him, until he was drained completely, like everyone else in his dynasty had been.

            “I hate to do this to you. We searched your apartment last night, you know, and there was no blood. We even found your little secret wall inside your closet. That was cool, I really liked that, I hid inside the little space and had them put the fake wall in front of me and it was a nice cozy hiding nook, perfect for blood, I’d imagine,” Momoe said, smiling at the memory fondly.

            Nezumi tried to latch onto her words. The blood was gone. Shion or Safu or Karan must have taken it, they were the only ones who knew about it, but that was too dangerous. They were supposed to stay away from his apartment. Nezumi stared at Momoe, willing her to give him more information, but she was inspecting Nezumi intently now, spinning the knife in her tiny fingers.

            “There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she finally said. She raised her voice, didn’t look away from Nezumi. “Can four of you come hold him down? I want to try something. Just lie him flat on the floor, arms and legs spread, like he’s making a snow angel. Have you ever made a snow angel, Nezumi?”

            Nezumi watched four of the body builder Vamp Hunters behind Momoe step forward. They walked around Momoe, who still crouched in front of Nezumi, and then Nezumi was being grabbed, his wrists and ankles, one limb held by each of the four of them.

            Nezumi was slammed flat onto the floor. His limbs spread. He stared up at the ceiling. Swallowed again so he wouldn’t choke on more blood that had flooded his mouth. He didn’t even know where it was coming from. Maybe it was rising up from his throat, and he was swallowing it back down in a cycle.

            Nezumi turned his head to the side so he wouldn’t choke on his blood vomit. So he could stop swallowing. He felt Momoe touching his waist and heard himself breathing louder, gasping, a desperate sound coming out of his lips.

            Nezumi did not think he was in control of his own breathing. He was not aware of gasping, of sucking air into his chest or letting it go so violently. He was only aware of the sound of his breaths, leaving his lips and entering again, a strained panting sort of sound, not a sound he thought he’d ever made in his life.

             Momoe’s fingers trickled up Nezumi’s stomach. She was tugging up his shirt, Nezumi could feel the fabric – wet from blood and sweat – lifting up off his skin, pulling at his underarms until Momoe stopped yanking at it.

            Her fingers were on his bare chest, then, scarcely touching him.

            “Do you like pain, Nezumi? Is that why you won’t say anything?” Momoe asked, and she didn’t give Nezumi the chance to answer even if he’d wanted to as then there was a searing pain in Nezumi’s chest, and somebody was screaming, and Nezumi was fully aware that that somebody was him, but he’d never heard his voice like this, torn from him.

            He arched his back against the floor. Thrashed and the hands pinning his limbs tightened.

            “I’ll stop whenever you want me to, you know,” Momoe said, and Nezumi closed his eyes, shut his mouth, clenched his jaw and worried he’d break it with how tightly he held it closed.

            Momoe kept carving his chest. Nezumi kept himself from yelling.

            It was only right as Nezumi was losing consciousness again – he wasn’t sure how often it had happened before, he’d been trying to keep track but he couldn’t, he’d been trying more not to lose consciousness at all but he couldn’t do that either – that Nezumi heard a loud blaring noise repeated, like an alarm, and against his closed eyelids there seemed to be flickering red lights, and then there was a loud voice repeating something, nothing Nezumi could concentrate on enough to decipher.

            He thought the pain stopped, then, but maybe that was because he was, in the next second, unconscious.

*

Shion woke from his sedation, was unsure how much time had passed. He was alone in the room, which was empty besides the other concrete chairs in the line, and there was a band-aid over the inside crease of his arm. He’d been blood tested. He wasn’t sure how long vamp screening took, how long it took to decipher blood from poison. He couldn’t imagine it’d be very long.

            Shion was chained, now, to his own concrete chair. He pulled his arms up as hard as he could, but the chains were solid, utterly immovable, as if the chains had the weight of buildings.

            Shion tried to use his vamp strength. Willed himself to use it, but he wasn’t sure that it was working. He couldn’t tell if he was fighting his binds with the strength of a human or a vamp, and he wasn’t sure why he couldn’t tell this.

            After five minutes of struggling – or so Shion guessed, but there weren’t any clocks in the room – there was a buzzing of the door, and then it clicked open, and a girl walked in.

            She seemed abnormally young and small and delicate compared to the Vamp Hunters Shion had come in contact with, and she wore her hair in pigtails like a child might, but none of this was the most noticeable thing about her. The most noticeable thing about this girl was the fact that she was nearly covered in blood.

            Shion stopped trying to free himself immediately. Sat completely still and watched the girl walk into the room – five large Vamp Hunters with their massive guns flanking her – before stopping in front of Shion’s chair.

            “Well, hello! What a pleasure to meet you. I’m Momoe,” the girl said, and Shion felt, instantly, hollowed. He had been holding his breath on her entrance, but now, when he inhaled, he could smell Nezumi in an almost overwhelming way – the earthy scent of him, incredible and intoxicating and familiar and comforting, and it was all over this girl.

            She was covered in Nezumi’s blood.

            “And you’re Shion, of course, I know what all Nezumi’s affiliates look like. You’ve been a hard man to reach, and now you’re sneaking about in the headquarters, well, that’s just not a good sign.”

            Shion could not really see the girl any longer. Spots drifted in front of his eyes. He felt dizzy and strange and as if he could not breathe, but he must have been inhaling as he could still smell Nezumi, Nezumi’s blood, strong and potent and overpowering and Shion thought his entire body was shaking but he couldn’t really tell, he couldn’t tell anything.

            “Are you all right? You don’t look so well. Oh,” the girl giggled, a childlike sound, “it’s me, isn’t it? I forgot to clean myself up, I just heard the alarms and simply had to know what all the fuss was about, and in all the excitement I’ve come on up to meet you just filthy like this, how embarrassing, I’m definitely embarrassed.”

            Shion breathed in again, forced himself to. With the smell of Nezumi, potent as it was, Shion thought he could imagine Nezumi in the room with him. Shion thought he could hear Nezumi’s voice – _I’m stupidly in love with you, professor. I don’t know anything else, but I know this._ Shion thought he could feel Nezumi’s touch, unraveling Shion’s fingers from Shion’s palm so he could clear a space for his lips to briefly press. Shion thought he could taste Nezumi’s sweat, the same saltiness as when it dripped down from Nezumi’s hairline when they had sex in the summer heat, and Shion couldn’t afford air conditioning, and it caught in Shion’s lips like salted rainwater when he gasped as Nezumi rocked deeper into him. Shion thought he could see Nezumi, that smile of his like when he’d gotten his cast off, when he’d whipped off the pillow case he’d covered his arm with, when he’d asked Shion, _What do you think?_ as if the only reason his body had even bothered healing his arm at all was so that Nezumi could offer it to Shion.

            Shion held the scent of Nezumi in his lungs, breathed him in deeper and felt strange, as if his body was changing, as if everything was changing. He thought the girl was speaking again but he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t hear her, he couldn’t hear anything but a sudden loud clattering, splintering, deafening sound.

            There were gunshots next and Shion spun around, broke the back of the chair he’d been sitting on free from the rest of it and held the slab in front of himself and the bullets implanted themselves in the thick concrete.

            A concrete that was not vamp-proof, and neither were the chains, and Shion had apparently broken them without realizing it, as they trailed from his wrists and clanked against the concrete that he held up. It took no effort at all to hold the entire back of the chair up. It took no effort at all to throw it at the Vamp Hunter nearest him, and as he heard an agonized shout and what was certainly the splintering of bone, he jumped behind the chair that was beside his own, let the straight concrete back of this one catch more bullets for him. He broke the back off of it too, threw it at another Vamp Hunter, who collapsed beneath it as the first had, with more shouting and more sounds of a crunching body.

            The pig-tailed girl was yelling something. There were eleven chairs and five Vamp Hunters with guns and this girl who didn’t have a gun but who had Nezumi’s blood all over her. More Vamp Hunters would be attracted by the noise. Shion thought about this as he ducked behind the next chair in line, broke it and tossed it at a third Vamp Hunter.

            Two of the big Vamp Hunters were left uncrushed and shooting at him, but the girl had run, and Shion saw this as he threw the back of a fourth chair at another Vamp Hunter.

            One left. The others were probably dead. The chairs were very heavy, after all. Heavier than a house, Shion thought, maybe heavier than several houses, though he couldn’t be sure, as to him they had no weight.

            Still, cement was a heavy thing. Cement meant to be vamp-proof was a _much_ heavier thing. Shion took out the last Vamp Hunter, then ran forward, grabbed one of their massive guns – also weightless in his hands.

            An alarm was going off, similar to the alarm from when Shion had been on the seventh floor. Shion left the room, following the thick smell of Nezumi’s blood. It was incredibly strong. Shion thought his senses were heightened. He had not known this could happen. He did not think about it too much, he did not really care about it.

            He cared about Nezumi. Nothing else mattered.

*

Nezumi woke to the sound of blaring alarms. He thought in a vague way that he’d passed out to this same sound and figured that meant he couldn’t have been passed out for very long.

            There was a tight sensation around his body, like a rope being tied around his chest, or a leather band strapping him to a concrete seat, and Nezumi immediately jerked back, opened his eyes.

            “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s me.”

            Nezumi could barely see anything, but he knew Shion’s voice, immediately relaxed, then tensed again.

            He was in Vamp Hunter headquarters, which meant Shion was too.

            He felt Shion’s hand brush across his forehead, and then Nezumi could see, realized his hair had been in his eyes.

            Shion’s face loomed in front of his. He had on his human disguise. There was a smear of blood on his forehead, and Nezumi stared at this even though it was hard to stare, it was hard to focus on anything, it was hard to concentrate at all. Nezumi’s head felt weightless, and soon Shion’s face was swimming in front of him. Nezumi wondered if he was underwater. If this was the next stage of torture – drowning.

            “Can you walk? We need to get out of here,” Shion was saying. He spoke gently, but behind his voice was another voice, a loud voice coming from some sort of loudspeaker system, speaking even above the blaring alarm.

            _Vampire uncontained and armed on floor 9, room 11. Door barricaded. All units at emergency stations. Vampire uncontained and armed on floor 9, room 11. Door barricaded. All units at emergency stations._ _Vampire uncontained and armed on floor 9, room 11. Door barricaded…_

            Nezumi was lying flat on the floor. His body throbbed and felt numb all at once. He turned his head and saw that he was not drowning. He was still in his concrete room, recognized the patches of his own blood splotching the white floor, but the concrete chair he’d been strapped to was missing from the center.

            Nezumi glanced around blearily, spotted it across the room, slammed against the door. He couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there, and he tried to think of possibilities, but he couldn’t think of anything.

            “Nezumi, look at me. Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

            Nezumi looked away from the door. There was blood all over Shion’s hands and chest, which was bare, shirtless, and Nezumi couldn’t figure this out either, didn’t bother trying this time. When Nezumi looked at Shion’s face again, Shion was wiping his hand across the back of his forehead to move his hair that was slick with sweat – leaving another smear of blood there.

            “Is that my blood?” Nezumi asked. His voice did not sound familiar to his ears. It did not sound like a voice, but wind pulling out his lips. There was pounding on the other side of the door. Shouting. The voice over the loudspeaker, repeating, repeating, repeating, _Vampire uncontained and armed on floor 9, room 11…_

            “Yes. You’ve lost a lot, so we need to get you out of here as soon as possible. I’m going to wrap my arms around you and help you stand up. Okay?”

            Shion spoke very calmly. This was soothing, but Nezumi didn’t think he was supposed to be soothed.

            “Are you the vamp uncontained and armed?” he asked. He tried to speak louder than he had before, but if anything, he thought his voice seemed quieter, wispy and unsubstantial and maybe not even there at all.

            “Yes,” Shion said, again calmly, as if it didn’t matter that they were in Vamp Hunter headquarters and Shion’s vamp identity and whereabouts were being broadcasted on the loudspeaker repeatedly. Maybe it didn’t matter. Nezumi couldn’t think.

            Shion was leaning over Nezumi, and Nezumi felt Shion hugging him, and the feeling of his body was nice, but then Nezumi realized Shion wasn’t hugging him, Shion was wrapping his arms around Nezumi’s back so he could pull Nezumi up off the floor.

            Nezumi exhaled sharply, sound coming out with his breath, a pathetic kind of sound that Nezumi hadn’t meant to make, and Shion froze, then kept pulling Nezumi until he was sitting up.

            Shion kept his hands on Nezumi’s upper arms. He was looking at Nezumi’s chest, so Nezumi did so as well.

            There was a shirt wrapped around it, twisted like a rope. Shion’s shirt, Nezumi realized. Nezumi’s own t-shirt was bunched over the rope of Shion’s that bound his torso. Shion’s t-shirt rope was white, but there was a red blotch, the shape of a tiny star, in the very center of it.

            “Your chest is bleeding, but you’ll be okay, they’re shallow cuts, it’ll stop soon. We have to go now, Nezumi, okay? Let’s just get out of here.”

            Shion looked at Nezumi hard, like he was waiting for an answer, so Nezumi nodded. He wanted to get out too. He’d been trying to think of a plan. Even now, he tried to think, but his head felt foggy, his thoughts unclear. He wanted to lie on the floor again. His body felt pulled and pushed simultaneously. The only thing that kept him from collapsing back was Shion’s hands on his arms.

            “Nezumi. Nezumi,” Shion said sharply, a break in the calm, and Nezumi opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized he’d closed them.

            “Sorry,” he whispered. He didn’t know why he was apologizing, but it felt important that he did. He suspected he’d done something very wrong. That was why Shion was in Vamp Hunter headquarters. He shouldn’t have been here. Nezumi could barely think at all, but he was almost certain Shion was not supposed to be here.

            Shion squinted at him, then nodded, like he was answering a question. Nezumi couldn’t remember if he’d asked a question. It was likely. He had a lot of questions. He didn’t know how Shion was in front of him, so calm when there were Vamp Hunters everywhere and they seemed to know Shion was a vamp. He didn’t know why he felt the way he did, like half his body was missing, like his thoughts were trailing off before they even formed. He didn’t know where Momoe was, and at the thought of Momoe, Nezumi felt sudden alertness, opened his eyes again – he must have closed them again accidentally – to see that Shion was standing up, pulling Nezumi up with him.

            “I’m going to carry you on my back, I don’t think you can walk, and it’ll be faster this way. I’m strong, remember? Vamp strong, so it won’t be a problem,” Shion was saying, speaking slowly and softly, and Nezumi was standing beside him, couldn’t remember even getting to his feet, was amazed by the fact that he was on his feet, felt an immediate urge to collapse, but then Shion was stepping in front of him, and Nezumi felt Shion’s hands on his wrists, pulling them, wrapping Nezumi’s arms around Shion’s neck.

            “Can you hold onto me? I’m going to crouch down and let go of your arms so that I can grab your legs, and then I’ll hoist you up onto my back, so hold tight,” Shion said.

            “Shion.” There was something urgent Nezumi had to tell him. He couldn’t remember. He’d just thought of it and now he couldn’t remember.

            “Keep your arms around my neck,” Shion said, so Nezumi tried to do that, and then he felt Shion’s hands coming under his thighs, and Nezumi was no longer on the ground, and he wrapped his arms tighter around Shion’s neck. His chest and stomach were against Shion’s back, and Nezumi curled into the man, breathed hard into the back of Shion’s neck, uncertain and dizzy and worried about something, he wasn’t sure what.

            “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

            Nezumi wrapped his legs around Shion’s waist. He didn’t know how his legs had gotten around Shion’s waist. He didn’t know how he’d gotten on Shion’s back, like a piggy-back ride, his dad used to give him piggy-back rides, that was a long time ago, Nezumi thought, a time he barely remembered, a time that maybe hadn’t ever existed at all. Nezumi wasn’t sure. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t think.

            “Squeeze your legs around me so you don’t fall, I can only hold you with one hand, I have to hold the gun with the other.”

            “The gun?” Nezumi breathed in the smell of Shion. He smelled like blood. Or maybe it was Nezumi himself that smelled like blood. He thought his face was covered in it, and his arms and chest. His chest hurt a lot. Nezumi wondered if he should tell Shion this. It was a scary kind of pain, and Nezumi wanted to keep it secret from Shion. Didn’t want Shion to be scared of it the way Nezumi was.

            “I took a Vamp Hunter’s gun, it’s big, and I’m going to keep us safe with it. I’m going to move the chair from the door, and then I’m going to have to open the door, and there’s going to be a lot of Vamp Hunters, so you have to hold on while I get us through them. The chair is going to be our shield, the back is heavy and concrete and blocks bullets well, so I’ll have to hold that too, and the gun, and you have to stay on my back even when I’m not holding onto you, so that part is up to you. Nezumi, can you do that? Can you hold onto me?”

            Nezumi rested his chin on Shion’s shoulder. Tried to concentrate. He didn’t know why he felt so light, so empty. He didn’t know why he couldn’t remember the last thing Shion had said.

            “I feel empty,” Nezumi admitted. Maybe Shion would know what to do. Shion, who was so calm, Shion, who seemed to have a plan when Nezumi did not, had not thought of one and could not think of one now, could not think of anything.

            “As soon as we’re out of here, I’ll get you blood transfusions, and you’ll feel a lot better. But we have to get out of here first. Hold onto me, Nezumi, don’t let go.”

            Nezumi tried to listen. He hooked his ankles in front of Shion’s waist. He tightened his arms around Shion’s neck. He curled as close to the man as he could, the way he used to when his dad gave him piggy-back rides – had that happened? Had he ever even had a dad? Nezumi couldn’t remember the man’s face, maybe that meant he’d never even existed.

            But Shion existed, he must have existed, he was right there, somehow, he was right here. Nezumi felt safe with Shion. Even though they were in Vamp Hunter headquarters, even though he felt too empty, even though alarms were blaring, even though Momoe was probably outside the door –

            Nezumi snapped his head up just as Shion reached for the cement chair he’d jammed against the door.

            “Momoe,” he gasped. He pressed himself closer to Shion’s back, and that made his chest hurt more, but he needed to be closer.

            “Don’t worry about her, just worry about holding onto me,” Shion said. His voice sounded different. Maybe it sounded the same. What did Nezumi know?           

            There were loud noises. There was shouting. Nezumi had his face pressed into the curve of Shion’s neck, the way he used to with his dad when he was a little boy and tired.

            _Are you asleep up there, kiddo?_ his dad would ask. Nezumi remembered this suddenly, with a strange clarity. His eyes burned and he wanted to be away from the noises and the lights and the feeling that something was incredibly wrong. He wanted Shion to take him home. He wanted to see his dad again, a longing that tightened his chest, and his chest already hurt, but now it hurt in a different way.

            Whatever was happening, Nezumi wished it would stop. He felt sleepy and decided not to fight that anymore. Maybe if he fell asleep, he’d wake up somewhere better.

*

When Shion finally found Nezumi, he thought, with certainty, that Nezumi was dead.

            He didn’t go to Nezumi’s body immediately. He ripped the chair that was in the center of the room off the floor and shoved it against the door so no one could come in. He’d slipped while doing this but caught his balance. Nezumi’s blood was all over the floor, puddles of it like rain on a potholed road.

            After he almost slipped, Shion walked around these puddles. To step on them felt like stepping on Nezumi, whose body was lying flat, spread eagle, in the corner of the room.

            Shion took his time getting to the body. Panic and fear and desperation climbed up his throat, and Shion vomited before he got to Nezumi, blood that he’d drank that morning before coming with Safu to Vamp Hunter headquarters spilling out his mouth, mixing with a puddle of Nezumi’s blood. The blood from Shion’s stomach and the blood from Nezumi’s body were the same color, and blended instantly.

            By the time Shion got to Nezumi’s side, kneeled down next to the man, his own body was shaking. He couldn’t name what he felt anymore, if it was still panic and fear, if it was anger now, or sadness, or a feeling that had no name, no word to encompass and simplify it.

            Nezumi’s face was cut and bloodied, swollen. There were gashes on his cheeks and neck and arms that Shion only looked at briefly. His shirt was pushed up, bunched under his arms the way Shion pushed it up when they made out and Nezumi wouldn’t let him take it off. There was blood on the flat of his stomach, and Shion touched it, felt that Nezumi’s skin wasn’t broken on his stomach or anywhere on his torso but the center of his chest, across the bones of his sternum.

            Shion pulled down Nezumi’s shirt to mop up the blood, then pushed it back up again. With the excess blood cleared, Shion could just make out the words carved into Nezumi. When he touched Nezumi’s chest, not the words but the skin around them, he felt beneath his shaking fingers Nezumi’s heartbeat, soft and quick like a bird’s.

            He was not dead. Shion turned his head and vomited again beside Nezumi’s body, more blood to add to the rest.

            Shion wanted to lose it. He looked at Nezumi’s chest and wanted to tear down the walls around him and use the gun he held and kill everyone and find that Momoe and let her live only so that he could carve words of his own into her. Shion’s desire to do these things was stronger than anything he’d ever felt in all his life. He could hardly breathe, could hardly bring air into his lungs, because there was no room for air. His entire body was filled with this want to hurt the people who had done this to Nezumi, and Shion had to take several seconds to push down this desire rather than let it consume him.

            He didn’t know if these were human wants or vamp wants. It didn’t matter in that moment. Nezumi was alive, and Shion had to remind himself of this several times, press his hand to Nezumi’s chest again, careful not to touch the carved skin. Nezumi was alive, so Shion couldn’t act on his wants. He had to get Nezumi out, away from this place. That was what mattered. He had to be calm, so he forced himself to be, and by the time Nezumi finally opened his eyes, Shion was completely calm in a numb sort of way, to a point where he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to feel anything for the rest of his life.

            It was better this way. It was better not to be able to feel anything when Nezumi looked at him so weakly, his eyes unable to focus. It was better not to be able to feel anything when Nezumi’s lips moved, hardly any sound coming out so Shion wasn’t sure how he knew what Nezumi was saying, maybe he was just reading the shape of Nezumi’s lips, lips so familiar to Shion that Shion would always understand them. It was better not to be able to feel anything when he lifted Nezumi’s body onto his, and the man felt a kind of weightless that should have been terrifying.

            But Shion wasn’t terrified. He felt nothing, and this was better. He felt nothing when he picked up the gun, nothing when he moved the concrete chair out the way of the door and tore the back from it and held it as a shield, nothing when the door opened and Vamp Hunters charged at him, nothing when he pointed the gun he’d stolen and nothing when he shot, over and over, at anyone who tried to hurt Nezumi again.

*


	22. Chapter 22

It smelled like cinnamon and yeast and fruit. It smelled like Karan’s bakery, so Nezumi kept his eyes closed even when he woke and just breathed, just let himself pretend he was in Karan’s bakery.

            He knew, of course, he was not. He could not be. He was possibly dead, but he didn’t think he’d be able to think if he was dead. More likely, he was imprisoned in Vamp Hunter headquarters still. More likely, he’d hear a buzz soon, and Momoe would appear, and all Nezumi would smell would be honey and blood, sweetness and copper.

            Nezumi preferred the smells of the bakery. Of icing roses and flour-stained aprons, of Karan’s bread-like scent when she moved him out of the way to get to the oven with a hand on the flat of his lower back, of Safu’s vanilla perfume when they baked together in late afternoons with no words exchanged but her quiet humming that Nezumi wasn’t sure she was even aware of herself, of Shion’s hands covered in globs of cookie dough that only once he let Nezumi lick off his fingers, wriggling and laughing with eyes crinkling.

            “There are scar creams, they could work, we should get some. Safu, can you go get some?”

            “Now?”

            “Yes. Before he wakes.”

            “Even if I went out and bought a cream now, we couldn’t apply it until the wounds heal, that won’t be for weeks. And scar cream isn’t magic. It’ll take months to work. I don’t even think it will be effective on this.”

            “The cuts are shallow.”

            “Not that shallow. Shion, I don’t think Nezumi will care – ”

            “I care!”

            There was silence again. Nezumi didn’t like this. The voices hadn’t been happy, but they’d been Shion and Safu’s voices, and Nezumi was comforted to hear them. He doubted they were actually in the room with him. More likely, he was hallucinating their voices. Usually, Nezumi would have hated the thought of hallucinating, but he didn’t mind it so much now. It was a break. Soon, Momoe would enter the room with a buzz of the door, and the voices would be gone, and he’d hear nothing but her girlish voice and childish giggle and his own hard breaths and the smack of her gun against his skin and the thick pounding of his heart in his ears.

            Shion and Safu’s voices were a reprieve from these other sounds.

            “Why don’t you go take a shower? His blood is all over you, it looks like it’s hardened over your skin. It’ll freak him out when he wakes up.”

            “It won’t freak him out.”

            “I’ll stay with him. You can let him out of your sight for ten minutes, nothing will happen to him now.”

            “And you know that?”

            “I won’t leave his side. I won’t let a thing happen to him. I do know that. Go shower, he won’t want to see you like this when he wakes.”

            More silence, and then the sound of a door opening and closing, and then Nezumi felt a shift under him, like a mattress moving, but he couldn’t be on a mattress, there was not a mattress in the room he was kept in, there was just a chair but Momoe had released him from that so that she could hit different angles of him.

            He was on the hard floor of that room, with its cement walls and no windows. There was no one sliding next to him, even though it felt like that, a body beside him, warm and hesitant.

            It felt also like there were fingers trickling along his hairline, tucking his hair behind his ear. Nezumi kept his eyes closed, wanted to shift into the touch but was worried that to move would break the hallucination. Or maybe it was a dream, but Nezumi didn’t have dreams. He had nightmares.

            “I’m sorry.” It was Safu’s voice, and Nezumi was certain he could feel the breath of her words on his shoulder. “The last words I said to you were cruel. I’ve been so scared, not just since you met Shion, but all my life it feels like, even though I know it was only since the Great Slaughter. And then you were someone to direct that fear at. And after the blood heist, that fear became anger, but I never wanted this, Nezumi, I never wanted you to get hurt like this, I hope you know that. I never hated you, I was just scared and angry, the way you used to be toward vamps, but my fear and my anger was at everyone in the world outside Shion and Karan. But you’re not on the outside of us. You’re one of us. You’re our family, my family, and I don’t want to lose you.”

            It felt as if the floor was shifting again beneath Nezumi. It felt like Safu came closer to him, it felt like her body pressed against his own, but Nezumi knew this was not real.

            He knew he was alone. He knew he was trapped inside Vamp Hunter headquarters behind a keypadded door. He knew he was on a floor after Momoe had unchained him because she didn’t think he’d be able to fight back anymore, she didn’t think the chains were necessary anymore.

            She had been right. The chains were not necessary as Nezumi could not move his arms. He could not move anything. Pain kept him immobile, and very quickly, he fell asleep again.

*

Shion had intended to shower quickly, but Nezumi’s blood was caked thickly over his skin.        

            Thickest on his arms. Shion scrubbed hard. The water by his feet was pink, a darkening pink, the way a sky at sunset darkened.

            In the process, Shion also scrubbed away his foundation, revealed his scar. He reached into his eyes and took out his contacts. Let them slip away in the sunset water, now a bright red, a ketchup red, a red like the make-up Misaki had used to create that gouged-eye look when Nezumi had been Oedipus. It wasn’t blood red, but there was more blood on Shion, and by the time he’d scrubbed it all off of him, the water slipping down the drain looked as if it had no water in it at all. As if it was all blood. Pints and pints of it, slipping away.

            Shion didn’t leave the shower even when his skin felt raw. He stayed and scrubbed and wanted his skin to come off, to see it washing down the drain as well. He was certain there was still blood on him, that it would never come off. He could smell it still, after all. Earthy and thick. It clung to him.

            Why wouldn’t it wash away?

            Shion glared at his loufa. Wished he had something stronger. A zester like the kind his mom used in the bakery to sprinkle lemon zest over lemon meringue pie. Even better, a grater like the kind they used to shred frozen coconut jelly into fresh coconut shavings for macaroons.

            Shion would gladly grate his skin. Anything to make the smell of Nezumi’s blood go away. The water soon turned cold. It wasn’t pink at all anymore, going down the drain, but clear and pure, but Shion was certain there was still blood on him. Every time he breathed it was there, the scent of it. Shion’s skin hurt from his scrubbing, he dropped the loufa and dug his nails into his arms and dragged his fingers over his skin and tried to scratch himself free of it.

            It hurt. Everything hurt. Shion’s knees gave and he crouched in the shower in the bathroom above the bakery that had been his bathroom when he was a kid and he started crying and he didn’t stop.

            He let his tears run into his mouth. They were salty and he hoped they would get the taste of Nezumi’s blood out his mouth. He hadn’t even drunk Nezumi’s blood but he could taste it so potently, the taste came with the smell, and Shion had thought he loved the taste but he didn’t.

            He hated it. He wanted it out of him, off of him, away from him.

            He cried and the water turned ice cold and he cried and tipped onto his knees in the tub and he cried and his fingers pruned and he cried and breathed in and still smelled Nezumi all over. He tried to vomit but nothing came out of him. He stuck his finger all the way down his throat and convulsed and only a terrible gagging sound released from his lips.

            He stopped crying. Stayed on his hands and knees in the tub, the chilled shower spray hitting his back. He breathed and let the smell of Nezumi’s blood fill him with each breath. It would never go away and he understood this now. Forever, Shion would be in that room in the Vamp Hunter headquarters where he’d finally found Nezumi. Forever, Shion would be standing at the doorway looking in and seeing Nezumi lying in the corner of the blood-covered floor and feel more certain than he’d ever felt of anything in his life that Nezumi was dead.

            Shion understood, kneeling in his shower, that forever, he would breathe as deeply as he could and still feel that his lungs were empty.

*

When Nezumi woke again he forgot to keep his eyes closed, so immediately, he saw that he was in an unfamiliar room, and not on a floor, but a bed, and there was a window, and the walls were not concrete, and the door was not keypadded, and there were several items of furniture.

            Nezumi took stock of the furniture without trying to figure out where he was. Dresser. Rocking chair. Wooden chest. Blankets folded and stacked on the wooden chest. Picture frames and a jewelry box on the dresser. Clothes folded on the rocking chair and a knitted throw over the back of it.

            The room felt very familiar despite the fact that Nezumi was certain he’d never been in it before. He felt very safe and didn’t trust that and looked around him at things that weren’t furniture, like his arm, for example, which had an IV sticking out of it, and Nezumi followed the line of it up to a bag of blood that was propped on top of the wooden headboard. The bag was one quarter filled with blood and three quarters empty.

            Nezumi sat up. Everything in his body ached at the movement and he gasped. He was glad he was sitting though, as it allowed him to twist – slowly, finding that any sort of movement hurt – to read the blood bag.

            On it, he read many things, such as a large letter “O” in the top left corner, and the words _Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital_ on the bottom left corner.

            Nezumi could not make sense of this. Clearly, he’d stolen this blood that was now going into his arm.

            Nezumi looked around the room for something that might give more clarification to his situation. He was alone in this bed he’d never been in before, but it had a comforting smell to it, a smell he knew but couldn’t name at that moment. Nezumi lifted the blanket around his waist to his nose, breathed in, his chest hurting as it expanded with his breath, but the breath itself a relief, the smell making his heart beat more steadily.

            Nezumi dropped the blanket to his waist and took a moment to inspect his own body. He couldn’t pinpoint where his pain was coming from. It felt like everywhere. More his upper body than his lower body, but his legs were somewhat sore too. His chest hurt most. His arms also hurt, and Nezumi could see that both were bandaged completely in beige wrap bandages, no skin visible but his hands and the little gap of skin in the crease of his left elbow that allowed for the IV to stick out. Nezumi wasn’t wearing a shirt. His chest was bandaged too, and the bandage wrapped down his torso to allow only a strip of his stomach to be visible. This strip of skin was an angry collage of purple and red, darker in some places than others. Nezumi touched his neck and that was bandaged too. He touched his face but it felt unfamiliar so he stopped touching it. There were band-aids on it and Nezumi didn’t really want to know what was wrong with him, but after a few seconds, he made himself touch his face again. Band-aids over his chin and along his jaw and on one of his cheekbones and over the side of his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

            This explained the pain. Nezumi still needed explanations for everything else, but there was no one else in the room with him. There was a nightstand to his left, and Nezumi examined the contents of it. A lamp. A cookbook. A box of tissues. A picture frame.

            Nezumi reached out, careful not to jostle the blood-filled IV. Picked up the frame and laid it flat on his blanket-covered lap and recognized Karan immediately, and a man he thought was Shion before realizing it couldn’t be. The man had a different nose than Shion’s. His face was rounder. His smile was lopsided, tilted to the left a little, in a charming way but it still wasn’t Shion’s smile.

            On closer inspection, Karan was different too. Still Karan, but a very young Karan. A beautiful Karan, and Nezumi still thought her beautiful, but in the picture she was almost breathtakingly beautiful. Nezumi touched her face with his fingertip. Her smile was the same.

            Karan and the man stood close to each other, shoulder to shoulder, which was necessary, as there was a little boy perched on their touching shoulders, balanced between the two of them, his tiny fists wrapped in their hair – entwined in a clump at the top of the man’s head and holding onto a fistful of Karan’s. He was laughing, his mouth open wide. He was Shion – human Shion, Nezumi knew, though he wasn’t sure how he knew this.

            The photograph meant Nezumi was in Karan’s room, which explained why he could smell the bakery, as her room was right above it. The photograph did not explain, however, how Nezumi had gotten to Karan’s room, nor how the bag of blood had gotten to Karan’s room and into Nezumi’s arm.

            Nezumi tried to think back. He felt very alert and mostly a combination of thirsty and in pain. The last thing he remembered was Momoe beating him with the butt of a Vamp Hunter’s gun. No, the last thing he remembered was her dropping the gun. Crouching in front of him. Pulling out a little pocket knife and having Nezumi pinned to the floor and her fingers on his chest, and Nezumi pressed his hands to his chest without thinking, which amplified the pain so that he inhaled swiftly.

            “Fuck,” he breathed. He looked down at his chest again. Bandages covered whatever Momoe had carved into him.

            Momoe carving into his chest did not translate to Nezumi being in Karan’s bed. There had to be more to remember, and Nezumi tried to remember it, but he came up with nothing.

            After a minute of coming up with nothing, Nezumi decided he’d had about enough of sitting in Karan’s bed thinking about Momoe, which made his hands sweat and his chest hurt more than it did already. He moved carefully, pushing the blankets from his legs, seeing that he wore a pair of Shion’s sweats. His ankles poked out the legs of them, and the skin that was exposed was dark purple.

            Nezumi wiggled his toes. His feet were not bruised and appeared to be the only parts of him, along with his hands, that were not injured.

            Nezumi pushed himself to the edge of the bed, exhaling deeply. The pain was manageable. It was a full body pain. From the color of his skin on his stomach, he assumed he had a good amount of internal bruising, maybe some bleeding. The bandage around his upper torso suggested broken ribs, maybe just fractured.

            It was pain he could endure. Nezumi had to figure out what had happened. He had to know if it was safe to be at Karan’s at all. How could it be safe? Who had gotten him here? Karan herself? The thought made Nezumi more determined to get out of this bed.

            There was a pull on his arm, and Nezumi remembered the IV, reached out to grab the blood bag and held it as he slid off the bed.

            He stood up, his body searing, took a step and immediately fell to his knees.

            “Oh, shit,” he breathed. He stayed on his knees to catch his breath, then heard footsteps outside the closed door and immediately scooted back toward the bed.

            He tried to stand, but his legs shook and his ribcage seared, so he gave up on that and settled with his back against the side of the bed, his legs crossed in front of him, blood bag on his knee.

            The door opened, and Shion stood in the doorway, blinking at Nezumi.

            “Hi,” Nezumi said, when Shion said nothing. He felt relief as an overwhelming thing – relief in seeing Shion, relief that Shion appeared unharmed – but though Nezumi had intended to ask some questions and get some answers, his voice died on his lips. When the immediate relief wore off he could see there was something strange in Shion’s expression. Nezumi squinted, tried to figure it out.

            Shion pointed. “The blood bag has to be elevated, or the blood will travel from your body into the bag instead of the other way around.”

            “Oh.” Nezumi lifted his arm up, tried not to wince at the pain in his ribs at the movement, and let the blood bag rest on the bed above his shoulder.

            “You should really be lying down, you have broken ribs.”

            “I haven’t been on the floor long,” Nezumi offered.

            “Let me get you a glass of water and some pain pills,” Shion said, and then he was gone again, leaving the door open this time.

            Nezumi stared at the empty doorway, confused and unsettled, but he figured he should be in bed by the time Shion got back, and he distracted himself from the odd feeling in his stomach with the arduous process of getting back onto Karan’s bed.

            He achieved it with much cursing under his breath, but was properly seated against the headboard with the blood bag back where it had been when Shion appeared again, this time coming into the room and holding out a glass of water and a palmful of two pills.

            “You’re in pain, right?” he asked.

            Nezumi examined Shion’s expression. He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t recognize it. He took the pills. “Right,” he finally said. He wanted to touch Shion or hug Shion or ask Shion to sit beside him, closer to him, but Shion’s expression stopped him from doing any of this.

            Shion sat on the edge of the bed, farther from Nezumi than he would have liked, than felt natural. “What do you remember?”

            Nezumi drank the full glass of water before answering. “I was taken to the JBVIC. They screened me to see if I was a vamp. I’m not,” he said, then wondered why on earth he’d said it.

            There was something about Shion’s expression. It threw him off.

            Shion nodded. “After you were screened, what do you remember?”

            Nezumi thought about what to omit. He wasn’t sure who’d dressed his wounds. If it was Shion, then he would have seen everything. If it was Karan, then maybe there were things Shion didn’t need to know.

            “How did I get here?” Nezumi asked, instead of answering.

            “I brought you here.”

            Nezumi leaned forward, regretted it, winced and cursed and leaned back again.

            “You shouldn’t move. And you shouldn’t be sitting up, you should be lying down.”

            “I’m fine. How did you bring me here? You were at Vamp Hunter headquarters?”

            “You don’t remember,” Shion said. It wasn’t a question. He spoke blandly, tonelessly, and it was then that Nezumi pinpointed Shion’s expression. It was blank. Empty. Emotionless. An expression that didn’t belong on Shion’s face, that had never belonged on Shion’s face.

            “What happened?” Nezumi demanded. He felt panic upon understanding Shion’s expression. Something had happened to him. Something had been done to him. Had Momoe gotten to him? “Why were you there? How did you get me out? What did they do to you?”

            “They didn’t do anything to me,” Shion said simply.

            Nezumi stared at Shion’s blank face, received nothing else, felt hot and leaned forward and ignored the way his body protested.

            Shion’s hands were on his lap, and Nezumi reached for them, held them tight even when Shion pulled away from him.

            “Don’t – ”

            “What happened? What’s wrong with you?”

            “Wrong with me?” Shion asked, and there was a flicker in the blankness of his expression. “Wrong with me?” he asked again, and it wasn’t a flicker, it was anger, an incredulous anger Nezumi couldn’t make sense of, and then Shion was standing up, ripping his hands free from Nezumi’s. “You’re not allowed to ask me that!” he shouted.

            “Why not?” Nezumi shouted back. He didn’t know why they were shouting. He thought maybe they shouldn’t be shouting. Were they in hiding? Weren’t they supposed to be in hiding? What the hell was going on anyway?

            Nezumi understood nothing but that Shion was stepping farther from the bed, and Nezumi just wanted him closer. He felt alone, and he wasn’t. He felt like he was still in that room, but he knew he wasn’t. Shion was right there, he was right there, Nezumi could see this but it felt different, Shion’s expression and the distance he kept made it different.

            “Because there’s nothing wrong with me! You’re the one who died!” Shion shouted.

            Nezumi was aware he was gaping. Didn’t even bother closing his mouth. It took him a moment, to be able to speak, and he did so slowly, wondering if there was something seriously wrong with Shion. “Professor, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I’m not dead.” He tried to speak jokingly, like he was not worried about Shion at all.

            “Oh, don’t talk to me like that, you don’t know what you are,” Shion snapped.

            Nezumi took a slow breath, tried to remain calm. Shion’s blank expression and toneless voice and nonsensical words made him feel an odd desperation that he didn’t understand and definitely didn’t want to show. “Shion, you’re acting like a lunatic, you must realize that. I do know that I’m not dead, and you know that too, so just – Take a breath and come back and sit down and tell me what happened and why I’m here and you were there and there’s no Vamp Hunters in sight.”

            “Stop talking to me so calmly!” Shion shouted, and then Karan was at the door, rushing into the room, her hands on Shion’s shoulders.

            “Okay, hon, it’s okay. Hi, Nezumi, it’s so good to see you awake. I’ll be right back,” Karan said quickly, in a breathless sort of way, pulling Shion out of the room as she spoke, and Nezumi watched her guide Shion to the door, Shion who started sobbing before he even got to it, Shion who buried his face into his mother’s neck in the doorway, and Nezumi felt hollowed as he watched.

            Karan combed her fingers in his hair, reached out with her other hand and closed the bedroom door, and from behind it Nezumi could hear her voice, soft and gentle and muffled, and then gone completely.

            Nezumi sat still, heat pulsing through him, and he wasn’t sure if it was shock or confusion or maybe just more pain, and then in a minute the door was opening again, and Karan was slipping inside – without her son – closing the door gently behind her, coming to the bed and sitting at the edge as Shion had done, but closer to Nezumi, her hand immediately on his arm, then cheek, then waist, then other arm, then under his chin.

            “How do you feel?” she asked, her eyes skating over all of Nezumi’s body.

            Nezumi let her assess him for a moment, then caught her hand when it briefly settled on his wrist. “What’s going on with Shion?”

            “He’s just a little overwhelmed, don’t worry about him for now, Safu’s with him.”

            “Why is he overwhelmed? What happened? He said he was at the JBVIC. Why was he there?” Nezumi demanded, his voice rising as he spoke until he was shouting, and he immediately regretted shouting at Karan, but her expression remained gentle.

            “He went there to get you, of course,” she said, freeing her hand slowly from Nezumi’s and pushing his shoulders back gently, and Nezumi realized he was leaning forward. “Don’t strain yourself, honey, your body has some damage to repair, and you should let it.”

            “Karan, you have to tell me what happened,” Nezumi insisted, not sitting back. “How long have I been here? Do they know he’s a vamp? What the fuck is going on? Why is no one telling me – ”

            “Nezumi, Nezumi, shh, breathe,” Karan said, smiling faintly, and Nezumi took comfort in her smile.

            He relaxed a little, leaned back against the headboard, but his shoulders stayed stiff as he waited.

            “No one is keeping anything from you. You’ve been here two days, it’s Sunday evening. As you know, on Thursday, you were taken by the JBVIC, and what happened to you there, you know more about than I do.”

            Nezumi didn’t find it altogether fair that he give information before Karan gave any, but she seemed to be waiting, so he exhaled hard and spoke quickly. “They screened me, I wasn’t a vamp so they had me in this room and…they tried to get me to tell them who I stole the blood for.”

            Karan’s eyes fell again over his body, a quick sweep, then were on his again.

            “That’s all I remember,” Nezumi finished.

            Karan nodded. “After you told Shion to get rid of his phone on Thursday night right before you were taken, he let Safu and I know the Vamp Hunters had most likely caught on. Shion went to Safu’s apartment as you told him to, and I went straight to yours. I collected the blood from your closet and took it to the bakery. It’s stashed in the kitchen right now. When I got back, about an hour later, a Vamp Hunter was at my door. I had a level one screening, passed of course, then was given summons to get a level three screening at the JBVIC within twenty-four hours. The same thing happened to Safu.”

            “What about Shion?”

            “They probably went to Shion’s apartment, but because of your warning, he was hiding in Safu’s room at the time. They didn’t search Safu’s apartment, so nothing happened to Shion on Thursday night.”

            “Then why was he at the JBVIC if he wasn’t summoned?” Nezumi demanded, and Karan smiled again. She looked tired, but unharmed. She didn’t look wary either, from what Nezumi could tell, or fearful or tense. As if there were no more threats, but Nezumi couldn’t understand how that could be possible.

            “I planned to go to the JBVIC Friday afternoon, after closing the bakery, to get my blood test. Safu went that morning, but I didn’t know that. We didn’t have our phones to contact each other, and I knew better than to go to Safu’s or Shion’s and risk someone following me. So I didn’t know at that point that Shion went along with Safu.”

            “Shion willingly walked into Vamp Hunter headquarters? Is he insane?” Nezumi shouted, realized again he was shouting, gritted his teeth together.

            Karan reached out, squeezed his hand. “It’s senseless to be angry at things that have passed. You just saw him, did he look hurt to you?”

            “There’s something wrong with him,” Nezumi insisted, and he waited for Karan to argue, but she didn’t.

            She looked down at her hand over Nezumi’s. “Yes. But he’ll be okay in time.”

            “But what – ”

            “Hold on, hon, I’ll tell you everything if you’ll let me,” Karan said, and Nezumi felt sheepish but still impatient even so.

            “Right, okay, sorry.”

            Karan squeezed his hand lightly. “Safu and Shion went to the headquarters. Safu was getting her blood test when Shion went looking for you. He did not explain in great detail, so you’ll have to speak to him, but from what I can gather, they caught him while he was searching the various floors. They knew he was affiliated with you and forced a blood test screening on him.”

            “They know he’s a vamp?” Nezumi asked, before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to interrupt.

            “Yes.”

            “But – How is he – If they know – Shouldn’t we be – ”

            Karan laughed lightly. “Nezumi, honey, sit back, you’ll break something else if you keep getting so agitated.”

            “How can you be laughing?” Nezumi demanded.

            Karan tilted her head. “Because all three of you, you and Shion and Safu, you’re all back home and you’re all alive after being in that place. I could laugh at any moment.”

            “How are we all alive? How is Shion alive? Why didn’t they execute him?”

            “I’m certain they would have loved to. Vampires are very strong, Nezumi, and Shion got away from them.”

            “Vamp Hunter headquarters are vamp-proof,” Nezumi argued, not sure why he was arguing because, clearly, Karan was right, clearly, Shion had gotten away.

            “I guess we’ve seen that they are not. From what research I’ve done since Shion was bitten, I’ve learned some things. It seems most vamps cannot just channel their vamp strength at any moment. Their lives must be in danger, and then they use their strength to survive. Humans are similar. We are capable of unbelievable feats when our lives are at risk, though of course vamps are capable of much more unbelievable feats. It appears that vamp strength is amplified to an even more heightened potency when it’s the lives of those we love that are at risk. I believe that is why Shion was able to get through the headquarters, despite it having been built to be vamp-proof.”

            It took a few seconds for Karan’s words to sink in. “Because of me,” he said quietly.

            “You were very close to dying, Nezumi. Even I thought…”

            “But they had guns,” Nezumi interrupted. He didn’t want to know that Karan had thought he would die. “Vamp strength can’t do anything about guns.”

            “He didn’t give me very many details. He’s home safe, that’s all I know. He and Safu showed up here with you in a terrible state, and I didn’t ask questions. You needed blood. Safu and I used to use these IVs to donate our blood to Shion before they went off the market for public use, and I had saved this one for emergencies when we started using syringes. It’s a good thing.”

            Nezumi did not care about the source of the IV in his arm or his own injuries. He felt fine. In pain, but he’d live, he was certain of that. “I’ve been here two days, so you had time to ask questions. I know you know more than you’re telling me. There’s something wrong with him, Karan, I know that, and I need you to tell me. What happened to him?”

            Karan’s eyes fell from Nezumi’s face. Lingered on his chest, and Nezumi glanced down as well, at the bandages that covered it.

            “Do you know what it says?” he asked, unable to stop himself. Karan squeezed his hand again, harder this time, in a way that hurt.

            She nodded.

            “I don’t,” Nezumi admitted.

            “You should not push down and ignore what was done to you, Nezumi. I know you’re worried about Shion, and you should be. He is different now, you’re right, and he might be for a while. What he saw there changed him, and what he went through to get you out changed him too. But you need to be worried about yourself as well. Terrible things happened to you – ”

            “I’m fine,” Nezumi said, his voice coming out harder than he’d intended.

            “It’s okay not to be fine sometimes, honey,” Karan said gently.

            Nezumi looked away from her. At the window on the wall across from the bed. He wanted to look out of it. He wanted to see outside. He knew it had only been a few days, but he felt as if he hadn’t seen the outside world in months. He felt as if all he’d seen was concrete, and blood, and Momoe’s smile.

            He clenched his jaw and blinked quickly. He was fine. He had bodily injuries, but they’d heal, and everything else he didn’t need to acknowledge.

            “You went through the Great Slaughter alone. You were forced to recover from that alone. But you’re not alone anymore. You don’t have to do this on your own now.”

            Nezumi swallowed. Still didn’t look at Karan. He thought about asking what Momoe had carved into him but decided not to. “Why won’t Shion come near me?”

            Karan took a second before answering. “I think part of him is still in those headquarters. I think part of you is still there too.”

            Nezumi looked at her then, startled that she knew this about him when he had tried not to let himself even acknowledge it. He meant to ask, _How did you know that?_ but instead what left his lips was just a breath of words – “How do I get out?”

            “You give it time,” Karan said, and Nezumi was glad when she scooted closer to him, when she reached out and tucked his hair behind his ears.

            He wanted her to touch him. He wanted to know she was there, and just to look at her wasn’t enough. He wanted to not feel alone, still in that cement room, waiting for Momoe.

            He tried to distract himself. “Aren’t we in danger right now?”

            Karan shook her head. “Shion’s death was announced on the news this morning.”

            Nezumi stared at her.

            “Tokyo has been terrified since the blood heist. The JBVIC blamed the heist on Shion and declared him found and executed. If they hadn’t, there’d have been mass panic after the fire.”

            Nezumi wondered if he’d misheard. “What fire?”

            Karan smiled lightly. “I forgot that you don’t remember. It was Safu’s doing. She started a fire in the JBVIC as a distraction so Shion could get you out. Much of the building’s structure is still intact, cement is resistant, after all, but Vamp Hunters are not resistant. There was a complete evacuation of the building. It didn’t go unnoticed. An event like that could easily start a mass panic in the same vein of that which occurred after the Great Slaughter. You would be too young to remember it, and of course, dealing with your own troubles, but the world was in chaos afterwards. There had been vamp massacres before, but never of such a large scale. It changed the way vamps were seen and treated. It was the start of Vamp Hunters and BVICs around the world.”

            Nezumi knew all of this, everyone knew all of this, but he let Karan talk because he liked her voice, so different than Momoe’s.

            “The Japanese Bureau of Vampire Investigation and Control was the forerunner of every BVIC in the world because the Great Slaughter occurred in Kyoto. The JBVIC takes its job very seriously. It was almost an embarrassment to the country and our government, that the largest vamp massacre in all of international history occurred here.”

            Nezumi knew the Great Slaughter had changed everything. It had changed everything for him, but sometimes he forgot it had changed everything for every vamp in the world. Sometimes he forgot that the night he had nightmares about was the same night that had led to the execution of every vamp that governments around the world could get their hands on.

            “I don’t think you realized the impact of your blood heist, Nezumi. People have been stealing blood since vamps became outcasted and donating to vamps became illegal, but no one has ever stolen so much blood at once as you have and gotten away with it. And this happened, again, in Japan. In Tokyo, the home of the largest, most prestigious BVIC in the world.”

            Nezumi had not realized the impact of his blood heist. He hadn’t thought about it. He’d thought only about Shion not starving.

            “What would happen to this country, if the person who’d pulled off the blood heist had never been caught?” Karan asked. “What would happen if you got away? What would happen if a vamp got away? What would happen if the Japanese Vamp Hunter’s headquarters were lit on fire, reminiscent of the fire of the Great Slaughter?”

            “There’d be panic,” Nezumi answered, after a moment.

            “There’d be panic,” Karan agreed. “The country would not recover from this, I don’t think. If we cannot trust our Vamp Hunters to keep us safe, who can we trust? The government, I believe, realized this. It was safer for the people, and safer for Japan’s reputation worldwide, too, to say the perpetrator of the blood heist had been caught. There are international and political consequences to these incidents as well, you know. If Japan becomes known as a country that cannot defend itself from vamps, then why should it be able to defend itself militarily? Why shouldn’t other countries raise their export prices against us? What can our government do to retaliate against other countries if we cannot even defend our own people?”

            “How do you know all of this?” Nezumi asked, bewildered now by the consequences of his hospital robbery that he’d only done so Shion could eat properly.

            Karan’s smile was slight. “I have a vested interested in vamp politics. I pay attention, and I research. And I truly do not believe that society is as convinced by the evil of vamps as it wants to seem. I certainly don’t believe the government is so convinced. There was a lot of fear after the Great Slaughter, and fear does terrible things to people. It makes them act recklessly. It makes them hurt others without thinking of the consequences, of what is truly right or wrong. I do believe that there are a lot more vamp sympathizers than we know about, and this includes vamp sympathizers in positions of power that could affect change over the law. But they won’t, not for a long time. Shame is just as powerful as fear.”

           Karan paused, then, lowered her gaze to her lap, and Nezumi squeezed her hand softly.

           When Karan spoke again it was quietly. “Since the Great Slaughter, in Japan alone, there have been over twenty-million vamp executions. I know the exact number.”

            Nezumi leaned forward. “You keep a tally of vamp executions?”

            Karan tilted her chin to the nightstand. “There’s a diary in there. Each time there’s a vamp execution in Japan, I write the new number down. That’s the fourth diary I’ve kept, after the first three were filled.”

            Nezumi stared at the nightstand. The movement sprung a sharp pain in his neck, but Nezumi barely acknowledged it. He imagined Karan writing numbers down in her notebook, each number another dead vamp, knowing every number could have been her own son. Wondering, maybe, what number her son would be.

            “It’s too much death, too many murders. Even if we have a better understanding of vamps now, even if the cloud of fear the Great Slaughter put over us has lessened, even if the truth about vamps is more and more evident, how can we acknowledge it? It will always be ignored. Maybe one day, things will change, but it won’t be for a very long time. The JBVIC in particular is overzealous. It will be a long time, before they will be able to admit the horrors they’ve committed were not justified.”

            “So, they let Shion go? Because they’re ashamed?”

            Karan adjusted the blanket on Nezumi’s waist, pulled it higher, and Nezumi let her even though he wasn’t cold at all.

            “Maybe. I think more likely, they just didn’t want more panic. More fear. They didn’t want the Great Slaughter all over again, on an even worse scale because now it is the JBVIC headquarters that was seemingly targeted by a vamp fire – it will look like the very people who are supposed to have the ability and skillset to defeat vamps were overpowered by them. It was easiest, to let Shion go. To declare him dead, so Japan could have this victory, so the country could stop worrying about the blood heist and the Tokyo vamp that people have feared since that Discreet Meat article came out. And it was easiest to say the heist was conducted by a vamp, to leave you out of it completely. Vamps don’t have rights to a fair trial. They’re allowed to be executed immediately, so that’s what the government said happened. If they admitted your involvement, then the people would expect to see your face on the news, they’d expect to see a trial. No one cares much about seeing the faces of vamps. Without you in the picture, there’s no loose ends.”

            Nezumi inspected Karan. She was calm. She really did not seem to think anyone would come looking for Shion. “Maybe there are people in the government who are vamp sympathizers, but Vamp Hunters aren’t. It’s the government who must have made the decision to lie about Shion, say he was dead so the public wouldn’t freak out and other countries won’t think we’re weak. Vamp Hunters will still want him dead. They’ll still come after him. The government won’t be able to lie to them, they’ll demand to see a body.”

            Nezumi didn’t know why he was saying _They._ He meant only Momoe. Momoe would not be appeased by the government’s attempts at peace in the country, or better international political relationships. Momoe hated vamps too much to care about anything else. Nezumi knew this.

            Karan still did not look worried. “As I said, fear is a powerful thing, Nezumi. And I believe Shion became something to fear when he found you in those headquarters. I think most Vamp Hunters will not be willing to pursue him again.”

            Nezumi watched Karan carefully. Hesitated, then asked a question he didn’t really want her to answer. “Did he kill any of them?”

            Karan expression softened. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him that.”

            Nezumi was relieved that she had no answer for him. He exhaled slowly, leaned back against the pillows stacked along the headboard. It seemed too easy, too simple, that everything could just go away, that Shion could be safe and no one could be looking for him now, but Nezumi felt exhaustion hit him in an abrupt way and was too tired to object any longer.

            “You should rest. I’m going to take out your IV, I don’t think you need any more blood, the level hasn’t gone down at all since we’ve been talking.”

            Nezumi watched Karan stand up from the bed, walk forward and inspect the blood bag before touching Nezumi’s arm, glancing up at him.

            “It will pinch.”

            “I’ve felt worse,” he offered, meaning to joke, but she didn’t smile.

            She looked down at the IV again, pulled it free from his skin, lifted the needle and tube so they were above the bag and the blood emptied out from the tube and into the bag again.

            Nezumi looked at the inside of his arm. Blood leaked out of him, but he didn’t touch it. He let himself bleed until Karan had finished wrapping up the blood bag and retrieved a band-aid from her nightstand drawer, placed it over Nezumi’s arm on the slim line of skin visible between the wrap bandages.

            “How did you know my blood type? I don’t even know it.”

            “We didn’t. O is the universal donor. You can still have adverse reactions to it, there are many facets of blood transfusions that present risks. But you look much healthier than you did coming in. I think you’re in the clear.”

            “How many bags of that did I use up?” Nezumi asked, as Karan peeked under the wrap bandage above his waist.

            “Not enough that you need to be stealing from hospitals again any time soon. Shion will be fine.”

            “There was just a year’s supply. Less than that, before I used some,” Nezumi insisted, and when Karan looked at him, her gaze was hard.

            “A year’s supply is more blood than Shion has had in a very long time. Now lie down, we’ve talked far too much, the best medicine is rest, especially for full body injuries like you have. Do you want more water? Do you need anything? To use the restroom?”

            Nezumi shook his head. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t need to pee and wondered if this meant he’d peed himself in the two days he’d been lying in Karan’s bed as he had in the headquarters. He decided not to ask.

            “Okay, sweetheart, rest up,” Karan said, helping Nezumi shift down so he was lying flat again, and she pulled the blanket up to his shoulders, pressed her lips briefly to a part of his cheek that wasn’t bandaged. Her hair tickled his skin, and Nezumi forgot he was twenty-eight years old.

            He caught Karan’s wrist before she could turn away.

            “Can you ask him to be here when I wake up again?” Nezumi didn’t know where the words came from, nor the smallness of his voice. He felt an irrational desperation that he would fall asleep and wake up back in that room, that the next sound he would hear would be the buzz of the door, Momoe’s childish giggle.

            He knew better than that. He knew he was safe now, and he made himself release Karan’s wrist.

            “I will ask him that,” Karan said, and then she hesitated, sat back on the bed. “In exchange, can I stay here until you fall asleep?” she asked, like it would be a favor for her, and Nezumi nodded, like he was appeasing her when he was fully aware she could tell he wanted her to stay.

            Maybe it was written all over his face. Maybe he couldn’t hide his desperation not to be alone.

            Nezumi was too tired to feel embarrassed or try to deny it. He closed his eyes, feeling Karan’s fingers lacing through his, and he fell asleep much more quickly than he’d expected he’d be able to.

*

After his mother dragged him out of her room, away from Nezumi, Shion went downstairs to the bakery kitchen.

            He wanted to bake pumpkin pie because that was Nezumi’s favorite, but he suddenly could not remember how. He stared at the bowls and whisks he’d gathered, at the bag of flour beside them and the sugar and the frozen chunks of pumpkin that he himself had chopped up, put in a Ziploc, kept in the freezer since a week before.

            Safu was in the kitchen too. Babysitting him, he knew, though she wouldn’t admit to that.

            Shion didn’t want a babysitter, but he didn’t complain. He had taken a large knife out too, set it beside the bowls and whisks and flour and sugar and pumpkin, and it was this that he picked up.

            “What are you doing?” Safu asked. She asked it casually, like she didn’t care one way or the other, but Shion knew this was not true.

            “Making pumpkin pie.”

            “You don’t need a knife for that.”

            Shion looked at her. She watched him carefully, and Shion knew why. There was something wrong with him. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he felt it too. A heat right under his skin, too close to the surface.

            Shion put down the knife. He looked upward, at the ceiling of the kitchen, as if he might see through it to the floor above, see Nezumi in his mother’s room, see his mother there with him, talking to him, filling him in on what he’d missed.

            Shion wondered what his mother would tell Nezumi. He himself thought that he’d missed a lot. There were blank spaces in Shion’s memory where there should have been spans of time. Shion knew he had gotten Nezumi out. He knew he had gotten home. He couldn’t remember exactly how. If he tried hard enough, he thought he could remember, but Shion didn’t try hard at all.

            “Shion,” Safu said gently, but Shion didn’t look at her. Kept looking at the ceiling and thinking about Nezumi in his mother’s bed.

            Nezumi had smelled different. Still earthy, but less so, blood mixed now with three bags from three different people that had donated to Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital. Now, with his earthy smell, there was a hint of desert sand, and a windy scent, and a smell that made Shion think of long, swaying grass.

            Nezumi’s blood did not smell anymore the way it had all over the floor of that room in the JBVIC. It did not smell the way it had on Momoe’s hands and cheeks and clothes. It did not smell the way it had over Nezumi’s own skin, or Shion’s skin, afterward, when it was slick and hot or when it was dried and cracked and he’d had to scrub hard for what felt like hours to get it off.

            It didn’t smell like that at all, but Shion still had that old smell in his lungs, as if his tissue had been stained with it. A part of him was relieved that he would carry this smell of Nezumi with him forever, inside of him. A larger part of him hated this more than anything.

            It was footsteps on the stairs that made Shion stop looking up at the ceiling, and then Karan was coming through the swinging door of the kitchen.

            “He’s asleep,” she said. Her eyes were almost immediately on the knife beside Shion’s hand on the counter.

            “I don’t remember how to make pumpkin pie,” Shion said, instead of asking how Nezumi was doing. It seemed a silly thing to ask. Shion knew how Nezumi was doing. He was dead and he was on the floor of that concrete room on the ninth floor of Vamp Hunter headquarters. He was dead and his blood was everywhere but inside his body where it was supposed to be. He was dead and Shion didn’t want to go near his body. He was dead and Shion would kill everyone who had ever touched him.

            “I’ll remind you, honey, we’ll make it together,” Karan said gently. She was suddenly standing beside Shion, and Shion had not noticed her walking into the kitchen. He barely even saw her beside him. He didn’t really see anything, but the blood like puddles of rainwater spotting the white floor of that room.

            Karan had put away the knife, as it was no longer beside Shion’s hand on the counter. It was just as well. Shion didn’t need a knife for pumpkin pie anyway.

            At least, he didn’t think he did. He couldn’t remember.

*


	23. Chapter 23

When Nezumi woke again, he thought he was alone.           

            The blinds over the window across the bed were open as they had been, but the sky outside was dark and no light came from it. There was a lamp on, on the nightstand opposite Nezumi’s side of the bed, and beside the lamp was a clock that said it was a quarter past one. Nezumi assumed, from the darkened window, that it was one in the morning.

            He pushed himself up, inhaling sharply, thinking he was in more pain than he had been on waking before, and only when he was fully sitting against the headboard did he notice he was not alone.

            Shion sat on the rocking chair in the corner, his legs pulled up, arms wrapped around them, heels resting on the chair as well. Shion was awake, eyes open and red. Even though he’d taken off his contacts, he hadn’t wiped off his foundation, as Nezumi could not see his scar.

            “There’s pain pills on the nightstand. You should take them,” Shion said.

            Nezumi hated that Shion was so far from him. He didn’t say this, instead silently reached for the pills, downed them with the full glass of water even though he already had to pee.

            He put down the glass, glanced back at Shion, then looked away from him again.

            Shion’s expression was still blank, his voice still toneless. At the moment, though, Nezumi didn’t try to get explanations, as his urge to pee was growing the more the disorientation of sleep fell away from him.

            He pushed the blanket off of him, slid himself to the edge of the bed, and was breathing deeply when Shion’s toneless voice was closer to him.

            “What are you doing?”

            Shion was out of the chair and standing in front of him now, though a good few feet away from the side of the bed where Nezumi sat. The dim light of the lamp cast shadows over his face, one red eye illuminated, one in darkness.

            “I have to pee.”

            “You can’t walk.”      

            “I’m sure I can manage.”

            “If you try to walk on your own you’ll most likely fall and hurt yourself more. I’ll get my mom, she’s sleeping in my room.”

            Nezumi curled his fingers in the sheets beside his thighs. “If someone has to help me, why can’t it be you?” he asked, making himself look at Shion even though he hated Shion’s expression.

            Shion stepped back from him. “It’s better if it’s my mom.”

            “You’re going to wake your mother in the middle of the night because you’re too afraid to come near me?” Nezumi demanded. “Either you help me, or I’ll make it on my own. Or I’ll pee on this bed, which I’m pretty sure I’ve already done.”

            Shion looked at him for a long moment, then stepped forward, almost cautiously.

            “This is where you assure me I haven’t wet your mother’s bed,” Nezumi said slowly, as Shion reached him, sat beside him on the bed, inches between them – inches like Nezumi used to leave, and Nezumi didn’t know how he’d left them, he didn’t know how it’d been Shion he was afraid of when now there was no one he wanted near him more.

            “I doubt you were in control of your bladder, you were unconscious,” Shion said quietly. He picked up Nezumi’s hand, his touch light. As if Nezumi was breakable, and Nezumi hated the thought but it was hard to deny when nearly all of him was covered in bandages, was pulsing in a steady ache.

            Shion looped Nezumi’s arm around his shoulder. Nezumi slid closer to him, felt Shion stiffen.

            “Why are you scared of me?” Nezumi asked. He felt Shion’s body pull away from him despite Nezumi’s arm around his shoulder.

            “I’m not. Let’s stand on the count of three. One, two, three – ”

            They stood, and Nezumi immediately tried to curl into himself, hot pain dashing across his chest and ribcage, but Shion kept him upright, a grip on his arm that dug into his bruises, made them pulse harder.

            They walked gradually, and Nezumi was again aware of the sound of his own breaths, much louder than he wished they were. He tried holding his breath just to stop them, but that didn’t last long, and then he was gasping for air.

            Shion said nothing about his gasps. Shion said nothing at all, and then they were at the bathroom. Nezumi leaned one hand on the sink and left his other around Shion’s shoulders and leaned into him while Shion pulled down his sweats.

            “Thanks,” Nezumi muttered. He wasn’t so embarrassed as he was tired, and in pain, and then relieved when he finally peed and felt, for a moment, marginally better.

            Washing his hands at the sink, he allowed himself only a cursory glance in the mirror, found that he didn’t recognize his bandage-covered reflection at all. Hardly any of his skin was visible, and his hair was braided over his shoulder but with sweaty strands loose and limp. His eyes, he recognized, but they looked heavy and tired, and Nezumi really didn’t care to look at himself for longer than it took to get over the shock of himself and look away.

            On the way back to Karan’s room, Nezumi could hardly hold his weight up, and Shion’s arm slipped around Nezumi’s waist, pulled Nezumi closer to him. There wasn’t any familiarity to his gesture, any warmth at all.

            “Almost there,” Shion said, and then they were, and Shion was helping Nezumi back into bed, stepping away until Nezumi sat up too quickly, hissed involuntarily at the pain, but still managed to catch the hem of Shion’s t-shirt before Shion stepped out of reach.

            “Professor.”

            “I’ll be right there,” Shion said, and Nezumi knew he meant the goddamn rocking chair across the room.

            Nezumi meant to let go of his t-shirt, but his fingers only curled tighter around the fabric. “I need you to be right here,” he said, and he didn’t whisper, his voice didn’t fall away, he’d never let himself need anyone in all his life, and now he did, now, he thought, he’d earn the right to need.

            Shion’s gaze was on him, but to Nezumi, it didn’t really seem as if the man was really looking at him. His red eyes seemed glazed, distant, skating over Nezumi as if he wasn’t there at all, and Nezumi, for a moment, wondered if he was.

            Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was still in that room, on that floor, and none of this was happening, and Momoe had broken him, and he had lost his mind.

            “You must be hungry,” Shion said flatly. “You haven’t eaten in days. My mom made soup, let me get you some.”

            He stepped away then, and Nezumi’s fingers fell from the fabric of his t-shirt.

            “Shion.” _I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t leave me alone._ Nezumi swallowed the words. For the first time in his life he’d admitted he needed someone, but it hadn’t mattered. Shion walked away, kept walking, paused when Nezumi said his name but only for a second before he was at the door, then out of it.

            Nezumi sat still, fingers curling in Karan’s bedsheets. The bedsheets were proof that he was not still in that room. Everything around him was proof, but it wasn’t proof enough. He didn’t know how to get proof. He tried to remember how he’d gotten over the Great Slaughter. How he’d gotten over screaming for his parents, for his sister, and not finding them. How he’d gotten over watching vamps tackle the people in his dynasty, pin them down and drink from them until they stopped writhing, they stopped shouting, they stopped moving completely. How he’d gotten over watching the vamps drag the empty bodies into piles, throw them on top of each other before lighting the haphazard stacks of limbs and torsos and heads on fire. How he’d gotten over sifting through the bodies until he’d found his parents and his sister. How he’d gotten over the silence of their chests and smell of their burning flesh and the blank looks of their faces, expressionless and empty and dead.

            That was worse than what Momoe had done to him. So he could get over this. He could push everything down and he could do it alone if Shion wouldn’t come near him and he could stop breathing so goddamn loudly, so quickly and shallowly that all he could hear were his own breaths rapidly filling the empty room until he thought he might start shouting and then the door was opening and he almost did shout, but it wasn’t Momoe, it was Shion, blank-faced and expressionless like maybe he was the one who was dead.

            But he wasn’t. He was alive and holding a bowl of soup and a napkin and a spoon and walking to the nightstand and depositing these items on the nightstand after moving aside the picture frame and empty glass.

            “It’s hot still, blow on it before you eat it,” he said. “It’s chicken noodle.”

            “You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

             “Why?” Shion asked disinterestedly, eyes on the soup.

             “Why won’t you come near me?”

            Shion straightened up from setting down the bowl. The smell of soup was strong and made Nezumi’s mouth water, his stomach clench around its own emptiness. “I am near you.”

            “No, you’re not.”

            Shion glanced at him. “You don’t smell like you anymore.”

            “That’s why you won’t come near me?” Nezumi demanded.

            “You smelled like the earth. Solid and familiar.” Shion spoke plainly, as if he was making sense.

            “And what do I smell like now?”

            “Strangers.”

            Nezumi pushed himself away from the pillows that were against the headboard. “You can see me right now, can’t you? Who gives a shit what I smell like, you know who I am, you know I’m – ”

            “Right before your eyes opened, I was going to bite you,” Shion interrupted, and Nezumi almost choked on his own voice.

            “What?”

            “You were dead, and I knew that. But I felt your heart beating still. Vamps can’t bleed out. We don’t have blood. We have poison, and maybe that’s not important, maybe we can live without it, I don’t know, there’s no research on it, nobody cares about whether vamps can bleed to death or not – ”

            Shion’s hands were around his arms now, and Nezumi could see where his fingernails dug into his skin.

            “Shion – ”

            “But then I thought, maybe you’d rather die than be a vamp. So I didn’t bite you. And I let you die instead – ”

            “I’m not dead.” Nezumi’s words nearly came out as a shout.

            “Then why is that all I can see?” Shion asked back, a real shout, loud and filling the room. On the break of his voice he started crying, his hands unlatching from his arms to cover his face. “It won’t go away,” he sobbed into his hands. “Your dead body and the blood and the smell, and it won’t go away, and it feels more real than you lying here, and I let you die and you saved me and protected me but I couldn’t do the same for you – ”

            Nezumi reached out, touched Shion’s arm but the man flinched away, almost violently.

            “Professor, listen to me, it’s in your head, that’s all it is, I understand, I do, but I’m alive, I’m right here – ”

            “Then why do I miss you so much? Why does everything feel broken? Why do I still want to – ” Shion exhaled hard instead of finishing his shouted question. He dropped his hands from his face and looked at Nezumi with wet eyes.

            “Want to what?” Nezumi asked quietly.

            Shion shook his head. Even though his face was wet, his expression was still blank. “I don’t remember anything after you died. I don’t remember if I killed anyone or everyone.”

            Nezumi did not point out again that he was not dead.

            “I want to go back there. Or I want them to come here, looking for me. I want another chance, I want to remember hurting them this time, I want to remember their bodies instead of yours, I want – ”

            Nezumi felt as if the breath had been knocked out of him, lungs flat and refusing to inflate. He could hardly stand to look at Shion, his red eyes and anger swiftly filling the blank of his expression, hardening his features into someone Nezumi recognized too well.

            Nezumi recognized Shion now, red eyes livid, as the vamps from his past. The vamps that were bloodthirsty and heartless and cold and unfeeling. The vamps Shion had proven to Nezumi he was not like in any way.

            “You’re scared,” Shion said suddenly, cutting himself off, his tone losing its sharpness, the anger in his expression fading almost immediately.

            Nezumi shook his head. The old feelings of panic were familiar now, but he refused to feel them. Pushed them down and focused on unraveling his fists from the blanket over his legs.

            “I’m scaring you again,” Shion said, quietly now, almost as if he was talking to himself, and maybe he was, Nezumi didn’t know and closed his eyes and breathed deeply and hated his heart for beating so quickly and his skin for being so hot and himself for being scared all the time now, unable to stop himself. He’d spent his life protecting himself, and Shion had changed all of that, and now he felt vulnerable and broken and like there was something wrong with him, like he was a different person completely, someone who didn’t know how to take care of himself, someone who didn’t know how to survive, someone who didn’t know how to recover from the things he had survived.

            Someone who couldn’t get better. Someone who _needed_.

            He felt his eyes burning and throat tightening and didn’t want to be someone who cried, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was crying and wanting to hide this, but when he pulled his knees to his chest to press his face into, his body hurt more, and so he cried more. He didn’t recognize the sound of himself crying, not like this, wondered if he’d ever cried like this since he was a child, since he’d pressed his hands to the hearts of his mom and dad and sister and felt nothing in return.

            Maybe he hadn’t even cried then. Nezumi thought back and couldn’t remember crying at all, ever, not for his family and not for that night and not for everything that had happened after that night and not for anything that had ever happened to him, and to cry now felt wrong, but he couldn’t stop. He’d never cried like this before, so he didn’t know how to make it end. He had no experience with it, with stopping it, with shutting himself up.

            He only vaguely noticed the bed sinking beside him. A hand slipping up the nape of his neck, another around his shoulder, pulling him, and Nezumi had no energy to resist, sagged into Shion who was beside him, Nezumi didn’t have to open his eyes to know it was Shion. He cried into Shion’s chest and felt Shion rubbing his back, felt Shion’s lips touch his forehead at his hairline, move against his skin.

            “You’re safe now, you’ll always be safe with me, and I’ll never leave you,” Shion whispered into his skin, and Nezumi still couldn’t stop crying, he felt like something had broken inside of him and everything was coming out and he couldn’t stop any of it.

            He cried only louder. It hurt to cry like this, with his shoulders and chest heaving and his throat tight and sticky and hot. He could barely breathe, and every part of his body seared from the way he was twisted to cry against Shion’s body.

            He felt sore and confused and exhausted and ashamed, but when Shion squeezed him tighter, Nezumi no longer felt alone.

*

While Nezumi slept, Shion changed his bandages and washed his skin with a washcloth he wet in a bowl he’d filled with soap and water from his bathroom.

            He started with Nezumi’s face. Peeled off the taped-down folded squares of gauze, having to work carefully so as not to reopen the wounds when he removed the cotton. With some wounds, the blood had dried to the gauze, and no matter how carefully Shion peeled it away, the scabs ripped open again. Shion pressed the washcloth to Nezumi’s skin, then cotton balls damp with antiseptic to the open wounds. He took every bandage from Nezumi’s face – there were five total – and tried to recognize the swells of Nezumi’s skin without them, the rips in his cheeks and chin and striking down one of his eyebrows. He took time to breathe and let himself feel the anger and the numbness and the abruptly insistent instinct to kill, and he waited for these feelings to fill him completely, to make his body change until he felt more vamp than human. He knew in these moments if a Vamp Hunter walked into the room he would not hesitate to rip them apart with his bare hands, shred their skin with his fingernails and teeth and strip the muscle sinew from their skeleton and crush each of their bones in his palms and tear at the soft of their organs until what remained was only an unrecognizable heap of bloodied tissue and cells at his feet.

            And then Shion focused on Nezumi’s breaths, streaming in and out his parted lips, slowly and whistling gently. And he focused on Nezumi’s eyelashes, and Nezumi’s ears, and Nezumi’s fingers, and every part of Nezumi that was still whole and unhurt and familiar, and he waited until the anger left, and he felt human again, and he knew if Nezumi woke he wouldn’t scare the man this time because he refused to ever scare Nezumi again.

            Shion replaced fresh gauze on Nezumi’s face before washing the exposed skin of his neck and moving to his arms. He unwound the wrap bandages on the left and then the right and compared the bruises on both, the rich purple of them, a color almost darker than black. The skin was torn more on Nezumi’s right arm than his left, slashes on his upper arms like those on his face. Shion was not sure how Nezumi had been injured. The bruises had come from a blunt object or maybe a fist. The cuts did not seem precise or thin enough to be from a knife. Shion wasn’t sure if knowing would make it easier or worse. As he slipped the washcloth gently over Nezumi’s skin, in his head he pictured every possible way Nezumi could have been beaten. Again, he felt the strange heat vibrating just under his skin, the feeling of losing himself, of being replaced by some creature with the singular want for revenge, and again Shion had to find himself again. Bring himself back. Remind himself that what was most important was to make Nezumi feel safe again, and he couldn’t do that when he couldn’t see anything but Nezumi dead on that blood-covered floor.

            By the time Shion had finished cleaning and rewrapping Nezumi’s arms with clean bandages it was morning, and Karan was in the doorway.

            “Do you need help?”

            “No.” Shion didn’t look at her. He had heard the door of his own bedroom where his mother had slept opening and had heard her footsteps too, coming to Karan’s own room. The door was open, and Shion knew his mother must have heard the shouts from the night and Nezumi’s sobbing too, because Nezumi had sobbed loudly, louder than he’d shouted, in a way that Shion still heard.

            Karan came in the room, gathered the used bandages Shion had been piling beside Nezumi’s blanket-covered feet.

            “You don’t have to get those.”

            “He didn’t eat anything,” Karan said, at the nightstand now, holding the bandages in one hand and looking down in the full bowl of soup, cold now.

            “I think he will when he gets up again.”

            “I’ll put this in the fridge to keep it fresh, and we can warm it up when he wakes. Has he been sleeping long?”

            Next was Nezumi’s chest, and Shion unwrapped the bandages slowly. There was gauze taped to the very center of his chest that Shion ignored, focusing on his broken ribs and the bruising and the wounds that he thought he could handle. If he saw what was under the gauze again, Shion didn’t know if he could come back from whatever it was that came over him when he thought about how Nezumi had been hurt, if he could breathe deeply enough for long enough to pull himself out of that room where Nezumi laid dead in his blood.

            _Not dead, he’s not dead, he’s right here._

            “A few hours. Mom, I don’t think I can change the gauze over – Can you – ”

            “Of course.”

            Shion didn’t want to leave Nezumi’s side. He still saw Nezumi dead in that room, but more than that he saw Nezumi sobbing, a sight he’d never seen before. He couldn’t get the sound of Nezumi crying out of his ears, a loud and breathy and desperate and hollowing sound. He couldn’t stop feeling how Nezumi had shaken against his chest until he’d fallen asleep, as if the crying had exhausted him.

            It terrified Shion to see Nezumi cry like that, but more than that, it was a relief. There was nothing more real than the sound of Nezumi crying, there was nothing more distracting, there was nothing more undeniable. It made it difficult to keep seeing Nezumi dead on that blood-covered floor. Only someone alive could cry like that, so loudly and fully and heartbroken. It was a more insistent reality than Nezumi being dead. It made Shion want to stay beside Nezumi more than he wanted to leave the room.

            “It’s okay. Why don’t you go downstairs and eat? It’s important to take care of yourself as well, I’ll come get you when I’m done,” Karan said, her hand around Shion’s and squeezing it, like she knew Shion didn’t want to leave Nezumi even for a second. Like she knew as well it would be better if he did not see Nezumi’s chest again just yet.

            Shion nodded, placed the washcloth in the bowl of soapy water and took the bandages from her and the full bowl of soup from the nightstand and left his mother’s room and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he put the soup in the fridge and the used bandages in a plastic bag, which he took outside to the garbage can on the curb after running back upstairs to put on contacts in the bathroom.

            It was early morning, and Shion lingered outside after he threw away the bag of bandages. Breathed the fresh air that didn’t smell like anyone’s blood, not Nezumi’s blood or the strangers’ blood that had been put in Nezumi’s body. He sat on the curb in front of the bakery and watched the sun rise until the sky was striped pink, and then he heard the ding of the bell above the bakery door, signaling the door opening.

            He didn’t turn away from the sky, even when his mother sat beside him.

            “It’s beautiful this morning,” she said.

            “He’s changed because of me,” Shion said back. He was thinking again of Nezumi crying. How vulnerable the man had seemed when never before had Shion ever thought of Nezumi as vulnerable, even when Nezumi had been scared of him.

            “You both have changed. You both have grown.”

            Shion folded his arms over his knees, rested his chin on them. “I just want it to be over. I just want him to never have to go through anything bad again. Hasn’t he gone through enough? Hasn’t he grown enough? I want to be able to keep him safe now, but I don’t know if I can do that. Vamp Hunters could still come after me. Whether or not the government declared me dead, the threat on my life will never be over, and it’ll never be gone from Nezumi either as long as we’re together.”

            “It’s not up to you to decide what is best for Nezumi,” Karan replied. When Shion looked at her, the early morning breeze was tugging strands of her hair against her cheeks and lips. She looked older than Shion had remembered her ever becoming.

            “I don’t want to be responsible for just another horrible thing to happen in his life.”

            “You’re not. Vamp Hunters are the ones who are responsible for his injuries, and the vamps from his past are responsible for his fear. You are responsible only for light and for love in his life.”

            Shion didn’t think this was true. He looked at the sky again, and it was a completely different color than it had been a minute before, more orange than anything else now, a deep and warm color.

            “Since the Great Slaughter, I knew you could not have a normal life. You prove me wrong all the time. You completed your education and excelled. You got a job at a university that you love. I thought that would have to be enough for you, I knew how rare it was for vamps to ever fall in love, but then you found a man you love, a man who loves you more than the world. Not many people get to have what you have, honey, I wonder if you know that. Love like this is not so common, it’s something most people will never experience, will never even believe is possible. As many terrible things that have happened, you will always have this incredible thing. Maybe that’s the more important thing to focus on.”

            Shion glanced at his mother again, saw that she was standing up now, tucking her hair behind her ears and looking down at him. She smiled gently.

            “Come inside. Eat breakfast and return to him. He’ll want you there when he wakes.”

            Shion unraveled his arms, pressed his hands to his knees and pushed himself up, followed his mother back into the bakery. He let her pour his bag of blood into a cup and drank while she gathered ingredients and bowls and mixing spoons and measuring cups on the island counter.

            “I’ll help you prep after I brush my teeth,” Shion said, after washing his empty glass.

            “No, go upstairs and rest. He’s not the only one who has gone through something traumatic. Go on, Safu said she’ll come by, and she can help me,” Karan said, grabbing Shion’s apron from his hands before he could pull it over his neck.

            Shion let her shoo him out of the kitchen. Upstairs, he brushed his teeth and washed his face, then looked at his dripping skin in the mirror and undressed, getting into the shower. He showered in ice water, scrubbed the foundation off his skin, was shivering when he got out. He ran a towel over himself and took out the contacts he’d only just put in. He went to his own room next, dressing in the few items of clothing he still kept in his old dresser.

            He went back to his mother’s room. Nezumi slept on his side, blankets tangled by his feet, and Shion freed them from his ankles and legs. He lifted them to Nezumi’s shoulders, then slipped in bed beside Nezumi, covered himself with the blanket as well.

            Nezumi smelled like soap and blood. Earthy like he used to, mixed with the strangers’ blood, but more strongly like himself than he had a day before.

            It was Monday morning. Shion realized in that moment that Nezumi had missed his Friday and Saturday and Sunday plays. Shion himself had missed his Friday lectures. He leaned up to look at his mother’s clock on the nightstand beside him, saw that he had another lecture in an hour. He didn’t have his phone to email his students that he would not be in class.

            Shion lay down again. A few missed classes and a few missed shows were little things, nothing important, not right now.

            Shion slipped his hand into Nezumi’s, which lay between their bodies. It was warm – more proof that Nezumi was alive, but Shion didn’t think he needed proof anymore, thought that Nezumi’s sobbing had been enough, more than enough because he heard it still, above the sounds of Nezumi’s soft breaths.

            He squeezed Nezumi’s limp hand. He felt, oddly, as if he hadn’t seen Nezumi in days, as if he hadn’t talked to the man in forever.

            “Wake up soon, I miss you,” he said quietly.

            He didn’t know if he imagined it or if Nezumi’s fingers really curled a little more tightly around his own.

*

Shion was sleeping beside him when Nezumi opened his eyes. He’d been having a nightmare – he’d been back in that room, he’d been lying on his back with his arms and legs pinned to the floor, he’d been screaming and Momoe had been carving his chest and giggling.

            But immediately, when Nezumi woke, he left that room. He remembered where he was. He was beside Shion. He was in Karan’s bedroom. He was safe.

            Nezumi scooched closer to Shion, the movement making his body ache in too many places to bother figuring out where it was worst. But Nezumi was used to pain. He didn’t care about it.

            Shion, he wasn’t used to. He realized it had not even been a year since the first time he’d kissed Shion, kneeling in the bakery kitchen. There was no reason he should be used to the man yet, no reason the sounds of his breathing should have been familiar, no reason to feel more comfortable in this bed beside Shion than anywhere he’d ever been in his life.

            Shion’s scar showed now. Nezumi moved close enough to the man to slip one of his legs over Shion’s thighs and hook his foot between Shion’s ankles. Shion murmured and tucked his chin. His hair rustled against the pillow. One of Nezumi’s hands was interlaced with Shion’s, and Nezumi didn’t move that one. He moved the other, touched Shion’s scar on his cheek, then the scar that showed on his neck, peeked out the neck of his t-shirt.

            If he tried, he found it remarkably easy to suddenly forget everything that had happened in the past few days. He found it surprisingly simple to pretend none of that had happened at all, and he was waking in Shion’s bed on Friday morning, as if he’d spent Thursday night there instead of at the JBVIC. As if he’d come home on Thursday night after his show at the theater, returned to Shion’s apartment the way he always did, and they’d had sex the way they’d only just started to again a few days before, and they’d fallen asleep against each other.

            Nezumi found it natural, in that moment, to feel as if his body didn’t hurt, hadn’t been beaten and carved. As if he’d never met Momoe. As if Shion had never thought he was dead, had never done whatever he’d done to get them out, Nezumi still was not sure and did not need to know.

            That was the past, and Nezumi was used to putting the past behind him. Was so good at it, and he would do it again now so all he had was the present, and the future, and both of those had Shion in them, had him waking up beside Shion, had Shion waking up too, stirring again and this time opening his eyes.

            They were red, contact-less, and Nezumi wasn’t scared of them at all. That was the past, and Nezumi had no use for that.

            “Hi.” Shion’s voice was scratchy with sleep, but it wasn’t toneless, emotionless, empty. It was his voice, the right voice, the voice he’d had in the mornings every single time Nezumi had woken beside him.

            “Good morning, professor.”

            Shion rubbed his eyes. “Is it still morning?” 

            “I have no idea,” Nezumi admitted. He didn’t even know what day it was. What did that matter anyway? Nezumi never wanted to leave this bed. To leave this moment.

            Shion smiled lightly. “You’re very close to me,” he said.

            Nezumi felt almost giddy with relief at Shion’s smile, a morning smile he knew so well, nothing like the blankness of that hollow expression Shion had just had. “You could be a detective making observations like that.”

            “I’m sorry I said you were dead. You’re not.”

            “A world-class detective. They’ll write books about you,” Nezumi replied, warmth filling him in a fast and amazing rush.

             “I’m sorry I wouldn’t come near you before.”

             “I’ve already forgotten about it,” Nezumi said, and that was a lie, but it could easily be true, he could so easily forget everything but this very moment, this very feeling of lying beside Shion and watching Shion bite his growing smile as if to stop it from growing any more.

            “You’re probably hungry.”

            “Probably,” Nezumi agreed.

            “I could get you something to eat.”

            “Already trying to get away from me again?” Nezumi asked, and Shion inched closer to him as if to prove him wrong. His face was nearly inches from Nezumi’s now.

            “No. I’ll come right back. I can feed you if you want. How do you feel?”

            Nezumi slid closer, to the very edge of his pillow, as Shion was on the very edge of his own. “Could be better. I kissed your cut to make it better. Now you have to do the same to me. It’s less of a risk, too, my blood isn’t poisonous.”

            “You’re hurt everywhere.”

            “Yeah, so you should get to it, it could take you a while.”

            Shion’s eyes skimmed over Nezumi’s face, then lower, and Nezumi could tell by the trail of his gaze that he was looking at all the places where Nezumi had bandages.

            “Do you want to talk about what happened?” Shion asked quietly.

            “No. Not right now.”

            Shion didn’t press him. He nodded against the pillow. “Do you want to pretend we’re normal people?”

            “Aren’t we?” Nezumi asked, and Shion smiled again, almost the stupid smile Nezumi had fallen in love with, a little more tired, maybe.

            “I don’t think normal people are vamps or the last survivors of the Gin Dynasty or people who’ve just broken out of vamp headquarters.”

            There was a white strand of hair among Shion’s brown locks. Nezumi wondered how Shion had missed it when dying his hair. His roots were only just showing, pricks of white that Nezumi only saw because he was looking closely, he was inches from Shion.

            “What would normal people do now?”

            “On a Monday morning? Or whatever time it is? They’d probably kiss,” Shion said, with such seriousness that Nezumi couldn’t even be sure it was a joke.

            Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Shion knew this.

            Nezumi didn’t lean forward because Shion was already pushing himself up onto his elbows. Nezumi rolled onto his back, and Shion followed him, leaned over him, touched the underside of his chin and then kissed him.

            He tasted a little like toothpaste and a little like sleep. His nose pushed against Nezumi’s and that hurt and Nezumi wondered if his own nose was broken. His lip had been split in two places, and that hurt too, a dull kind of ache that increased the harder Shion kissed him, and then Shion’s tongue was running over Nezumi’s lips, pausing on the swells of his cuts where blood hadn’t fully dried.

            Nezumi let Shion taste him, then continue to kiss him, then sit up too quickly and insist Nezumi eat something so he could get better faster and they could do more than kiss.

            “I don’t think any of the parts essential for sex are broken,” Nezumi said, trying to sit up as well, but Shion pushed him back down, and Nezumi was mostly grateful, as his ribs had been protesting.

            “Does it hurt when I kiss you?” Shion asked, taking his hands from Nezumi’s shoulders and touching Nezumi’s lips with just the very tip of his finger.

            “I don’t remember. Try it again.”

            Shion didn’t smile. He leaned back down and kissed Nezumi again, so lightly Nezumi could barely even feel it.

            “Does that hurt?” Shion whispered, leaning up again.

            “Nothing hurts,” Nezumi told him.

            Shion just looked at him. He straddled Nezumi’s thighs and wore blue plaid pajama pants and a faded red t-shirt that said _Uni Tokyo_ across the chest.

            “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to ever hurt anymore,” he finally said, and Nezumi made himself sit up this time, even though his ribs ached, and Shion didn’t push him down again.

            “Then I won’t hurt anymore,” Nezumi said, sitting up enough so that Shion was right in front of him. He leaned closer until his forehead touched Shion’s, and it should have hurt because there was a cut over his forehead, but it didn’t.

            Nothing hurt. It hadn’t been a lie. Nezumi knew pain, but he felt none in that moment, with Shion straddling his thighs and Shion’s breaths trickling against his split lips.

            “Everything can’t just be better now, everything can’t just be simple. I’m still a vamp. Vamp Hunters can still come after me. They can still come after you for being a vamp sympathizer, for helping me and hiding me. They probably will.” Shion moved back so their foreheads no longer touched.

            “I thought we were pretending to be normal people.”

            Shion sighed. “We are. Sorry. I’m not good at it. But aren’t you worried too?”

            Nezumi didn’t even have to think about it. “No. I feel very safe right now. I think it’s you, you probably should never stop sitting on my legs, then I might start freaking out again.”

            Shion smiled wanly and nudged his forehead briefly against Nezumi’s. “It’s not a joke.”

            “I’m not joking. Lucky thing you spent all those years in starvation, now you’re so light you can sit on me forever, and I’ll never have to worry about losing circulation.”

            Shion sighed, reached up and tucked Nezumi’s hair behind his ear. “Suddenly you’re all better. You’re happy and yourself. Just like that.”

            “Just like that,” Nezumi confirmed.

            “What about Momoe?”

            Nezumi stiffened, but only for a moment. He exhaled and let the thought of her rush out his body with the air from his lungs. “What about her?”

            “She could come looking for you. For me.”

            Nezumi preferred to keep pretending they were normal people, but Shion clearly was done with that game. “So there’s no chance she’s dead?”

            A crease appeared between Shion’s eyebrows. Nezumi searched them for white hairs. “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything that happened there after I found you in that room.”

            Nezumi rested his hands on Shion’s waist, above his _Uni Tokyo_ t-shirt. The fabric was soft, worn as if he’d had the shirt for years, and Nezumi suddenly wanted to peel it off of Shion, to wear it himself, to keep it.

            Nezumi squeezed Shion’s sides gently. “I don’t want to think about her. Or any of them, or any of that. Let’s not, not right now, not for a little while. Agreed?”

            Shion looked at him for a moment, then nodded, almost reluctantly. He tilted his head forward, rested his forehead against Nezumi’s shoulder, and his hair tickled the sides of Nezumi’s neck and jaw.

            Nezumi lifted a hand from Shion’s waist, wove his fingers through Shion’s hair.

            “Thank you for getting me out of there,” he said quietly, realizing he hadn’t said it before.

            Shion said nothing. Slid his arms around Nezumi’s waist, did not squeeze him tightly, but held Nezumi securely enough that Nezumi knew what he’d told Shion hadn’t been a lie – he felt no worry at all, in this moment, in Shion’s arms.

*


	24. Chapter 24

A week after he’d brought Nezumi home from the JBVIC, Shion woke in his childhood bedroom, the smell of baked goods slipping under the crack of his door just the way it had growing up.

            Unlike when he’d been growing up, Shion did not wake alone. Nezumi was beside him, had been moved from Karan’s bedroom to Shion’s on Wednesday. It was Sunday now, the last Sunday of September but hot as the thick of summer with Nezumi strewn over him, the blankets kicked down at their feet.

            Shion had slept a dreamless sleep. Unlike Nezumi, he didn’t have nightmares of what had happened in the JBVIC. But he did remember now, the way he hadn’t before, what had happened after he’d found Nezumi – _not dead_ – in that room. He remembered when he was awake, images coming to him while he showered, or brushed his teeth, or covered his skin with foundation, or baked with Safu, or did laundry, or prepared his lesson plans with Nezumi reading beside him in bed, or changed Nezumi’s bandages, or argued with Nezumi about the importance of bedrest, or laid beside Nezumi and tried to fall asleep.

            Now, Shion thought, there was nothing more to remember. He had all of it back, all of that lost time, but he’d have been glad to give it away again, to lose it permanently.

            He and Nezumi hadn’t spoken about what had happened since Nezumi had sobbed against him, a sound Shion still sometimes thought he could hear. They were still pretending to be normal, as best they could with Nezumi bedridden still, sleeping most of the day and night. His bruises tinged his skin green now, and except for the larger open wounds, he was no longer covered in bandages. He didn’t look quite human, seaweed green as his porcelain skin had turned from bruising, but rather like some sort of alien, or maybe a mermaid with that long dark hair of his, a sea creature that had never seen sunlight and was dying out of water.

            But Nezumi was not dying. He was healing, just slowly, and impatiently.

            Shion slipped out from under Nezumi carefully, rearranging Nezumi’s limbs once he was safely free from them so that Nezumi wouldn’t be sore when he woke. Nezumi had no bandages on his face now, and the hardened, raised scabs of his cuts were a deep red that looked almost black against his pale skin.

            Shion untangled the blanket from Nezumi’s feet and covered him with it before leaving the room, going to the bathroom and showering quickly, then dressing with the clothes he’d brought from his own apartment and put back in his childhood dresser.

            He put on his contacts and foundation and took note of his roots and that he’d need to dye them again – just because the government had declared the Tokyo vamp dead didn’t mean he could let his guard down. He headed downstairs to the kitchen where Safu and his mother were laughing quietly and covered in flour.

            “What’s going on?” he asked, taking note of their white powdered faces.

            Safu smiled, rubbed a flour-covered hand through Shion’s hair.

            “Hey! I dye that so it’s not white, you know,” Shion complained, rustling his fingers through his hair to free the flour.

            “I dropped a bag of flour and it exploded on us,” Safu said, while Shion got his daily bag of blood and poured it into a glass.

            “You’re up just in time to help us clean,” Karan said, kissing Shion on the cheek on her way to the sink to grab the dishtowel.

            “I was going to go to Nezumi’s apartment actually, pick up some of his clothes for him. My clothes are small on him, and the forecast says there’s supposed to be a drop in temperature later this week.”

            “You have a thousand sweaters, Shion,” Safu said, while Shion sipped his glass of blood – B positive today.

            “My sweatpants come up to his ankles. And he might feel better in his own clothes, he’s been getting cranky recently.”

            “Clothes have nothing to do with that, sweetheart. Nezumi is not someone who admires the value of rest,” Karan said, wiping down the flour-covered counter with the dishcloth she’d wet.

            “He can probably start staying at my apartment soon, right? He has more energy, of course I don’t want him being at his apartment alone yet, but we can get out of your hair soon, I’m sure.”

            “You’re not in my hair, honey,” Karan said, laughing lightly. “This is your home too, it always will be.”

            “I think he’d feel better not feeling like a burden to you. He keeps telling me he’s ready to leave, saying I’m keeping him hostage here. I told him that we can move out later this week.”

             “He’s so dramatic,” Safu said, shaking her head as she swept flour from the floor into a dust pan.

            “Stay here a little longer. When he’s up for it, Nezumi can spend the days baking, work off some of that restlessness. It’ll be easier if he’s just upstairs rather than having to come all the way from your apartment every time he wants to bake.”

            Shion watched his mother carefully while he drank the rest of his blood. She smiled innocently, but Shion knew a part of her wanted him and Nezumi to stay in Shion’s childhood bedroom forever.

            Even so, she did have a point. Baking was a low-energy activity, and Nezumi enjoyed it. He could at least do that while he recovered, seeing as he certainly wasn’t going to be acting for a while.

            “I’ll talk to him about staying a little longer.”

            Shion finished his blood, helped his mother and Safu clean the rest of the flour, then headed back upstairs to brush his teeth. He checked on Nezumi, toothbrush tucked in his cheek, and found the man still fast asleep, so he closed the door to his bedroom, rinsed his mouth in the bathroom, and left the bakery.

            He went to Nezumi’s apartment, where he hadn’t been in just over a month, since Nezumi had brought him here to show him the bags of blood in the luggage in his closet.

            Shion took the stairs inside the apartment building. It’d been a month that he’d been drinking healthy doses of blood daily, and he felt the best he’d ever felt in his life. He knew the irony – he was stronger than he’d ever been, and Nezumi was weaker. But Nezumi was getting better, Shion reminded himself of this as he arrived on Nezumi’s floor and walked down his hallway. Shion wished he could fix Nezumi’s wounds as easily as Nezumi had fixed his starvation, but then, that hadn’t been easy at all, really.

            While Shion slipped his hand in his pocket for Nezumi’s keyring that he’d swiped, the door beside Nezumi’s opened. The spritely teenager appeared, holding a neon yellow coffee thermos with pink writing in loopy English Shion couldn’t read because her hand half covered it.

            “The friend!” she said happily, on seeing Shion. She wore a sundress the same bright yellow as her thermos and a pale blue baseball cap that had cat ears on it.

            Shion smiled at her. “Hi, it’s good to see you again.”

            “I see you have a key this time. Guess your friendship has really progressed since I’ve seen you last. No more sitting outside his door.”

            “No, no more of that,” Shion agreed.

            “Haven’t seen my neighbor in a while. Have you kidnapped him and stowed him away somewhere?” the girl asked, closing her own door and stepping toward Shion, jutting her chin and giving him a wide-eyed look.

            “Nothing dramatic like that.”

            The girl hummed, returned to her door to lock it with a key from her crowded keychain. “So, he’s safe, then?” she asked, still looking at her door even after she’d locked it.

            Shion had been about to let himself into Nezumi’s apartment, but paused, hand on the doorknob. “What do you mean?”

            The girl shrugged, lifted her thermos-free hand and fidgeted with one of the cat ears on her cap. “Last Thursday – not a few days ago, but the Thursday before that – there was a bit of commotion in there. Around midnight. Lots of noise, like the sounds of something breaking.” She dropped her fingers from the cat ear. “Then I didn’t see him for a week. Any good neighbor would be worried.”

            “He’s okay,” Shion said slowly. “You don’t need to be worried.”

            “Promise you haven’t done something terrible to him?” the girl said, smiling lightly, but Shion wasn’t entirely sure that she was joking any longer.

            Shion tightened his hand around Nezumi’s doorknob. “I promise,” he said, but the words didn’t come easily, and the girl gave him a lingering look before her serious expression gave way again to the thoughtless cheerfulness Shion had come to expect from her.

            “Glad to hear it. Tell him he’s missed around the neighborhood when you see him!” she said happily, then bounced off down the hallway, and Shion could hear her humming something tuneless as she waited for the elevator.

            Shion took a breath to steady himself, then let himself into Nezumi’s apartment.

            The breath he’d taken fell abruptly out his lips. Nezumi’s apartment opened up to his kitchen, which had been ransacked. Pans and pots and plates and glasses and cereal boxes and cans of soup and silverware were strewn on the floor and counters. Every cabinet was open, the contents seemingly yanked out of them.

            Shion stared at the mess of it, then closed Nezumi’s front door behind him, made his way carefully to Nezumi’s living room. There were books thrown haphazardly from his bookshelf, the pillows from his couch on the floor and torn with their cotton stuffing pulled halfway out, and the couch itself was overturned, the bottom of it slit open like the cushions had been.

            Shion went to the bathroom, looked through the doorway at the devastation of Nezumi’s toiletries. Even the lid of the toilet tank had been taken off, was thrown into the tub and cracked, the shower curtains pulled down, which Shion didn’t think was necessary.

            What had the Vamp Hunters thought? That Nezumi had somehow hidden bags of blood inside his shower curtains?

            Shion didn’t want to go into Nezumi’s bedroom, but he forced himself to, found more books littering the floor, found Nezumi’s clothes among them, found Nezumi’s bed with the mattress pushed off the frame and gutted the way the sofa and its cushions had been. The contents of Nezumi’s closet had been wrenched out, and the fake wall he’d used to hide the blood was split in two and rested on a haphazard stack of his clothes.

            Shion wondered for the first time what could have happened if Vamp Hunters had gotten here sooner on that Thursday night, had caught his mother emptying the blood from Nezumi’s apartment. He immediately stopped wondering this and crouched down, reaching for the pile of clothes closest to him.

            Nezumi could never come back here. Vamp Hunters could have bugged the place, or maybe not, but Shion didn’t want Nezumi seeing what had been done to his apartment.

            Shion didn’t stick around to clean it. He didn’t know if Vamp Hunters had set some kind of trap and didn’t care to find out. He grabbed handfuls of Nezumi’s clothes and looked around quickly, knowing Nezumi didn’t have any personal belongings he would have wanted to keep other than the books. He found _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ among the others and left the rest. He could come back later, but at that moment, he had to get out.

            He felt the heat under his skin, the itch to rip the flesh of everyone who’d touched any of Nezumi’s things, who’d ruined his apartment like this. He didn’t think Nezumi had ever had any considerable attachment to his apartment, but Shion didn’t care, that didn’t matter, this was where Nezumi lived and it’d been ruined, treated with as much violence and brutality as Nezumi’s body.

            Shion took the elevator down instead of the stairs to give himself an enclosed space in which to return to himself, will away the heat from his skin and the desire to hurt, will away the memories of what he’d done in the JBVIC after lifting Nezumi onto his shoulders and getting them out of that room.

            The anger wasn’t gone from him. It came to him in flashes of heat, every time he remembered more of what had happened after he’d found Nezumi lying in his own blood. Shion knew Nezumi was noticing this – there were times when Shion was with Nezumi and he felt this heat, these savage and insatiable desires, and in those times Nezumi would touch his arm or wrist or hand, or say his name, or whisper just a quiet, _Professor, come back to me_ , and Shion would be relieved for the reminder that he was not in the JBVIC anymore, but more than that he’d feel ashamed.

            He didn’t want Nezumi to see him like this again. He knew it scared Nezumi, to see whatever change it was come over him. He knew he had to give himself time for it to stop happening, and he knew talking about it would help, but he also knew Nezumi did not want to talk about the JBVIC.

            For whatever Shion had gone through in that building, Nezumi had gone through much worse, but he was not showing any signs of it. After he’d broken down and sobbed a week before, he’d been perfectly fine, himself completely, if anything only irritable at the slow healing of his injuries, and Shion was glad for this but worried too. He wanted Nezumi to be able to talk to him. Nezumi shouted at nights, but like before, he never talked about his nightmares when Shion shook him awake.

            Shion left Nezumi’s building with his armful of Nezumi’s belongings. He headed to the nearest subway station to return to the bakery, to return to Nezumi, hoping he hadn’t been away too long, knowing Nezumi hated to wake alone.

*

It was Karan who changed the bandage on Nezumi’s chest, usually when Nezumi was asleep, though once Nezumi had woken with her beside him, dabbing rubbing alcohol to the carving with soaked cotton balls.

            Nezumi had not looked down, had instead alternatively focused on the ceiling and Karan’s face.

            Now, it was Sunday night, a week since Nezumi had first regained consciousness in the bakery, and the cuts, as they had started doing, were itching. Nezumi scratched the gauze, his fingernails raking over the tape that held it down until Shion grabbed his wrist.

            “Stop that.”

            “I’m not doing anything,” Nezumi complained, snatching his arm away, shoving himself off the bed.

            “Where are you going?”

            “Bathroom. Was I supposed to ask you for a bathroom pass?” Nezumi was irritable, and he knew it. He hated that his body was constantly in differing states of exhaustion and pain. He hated being restricted to this goddamn bed. He hadn’t even gone outside in a week. He hadn’t gone anywhere – just Karan’s room, and now Shion’s, his trips restricted to the bathroom. He wasn’t even allowed downstairs to the bakery, as Shion apparently thought he could not handle stairs.

            It hurt to stand, but Nezumi had been refusing to let Shion accompany him to the bathroom since Friday. He didn’t bother looking back at Shion, who was sitting on the bed cross-legged and working on a lesson plan, as he left the room, not wanting to give Shion any occasion to protest.

            By the time Nezumi got to the bathroom, he was winded. He closed the door and leaned against it before making his way to the toilet, peeing, then standing in front of the sink, looking at himself in the mirror with his hands against the porcelain, arms holding most of his weight.

            Nezumi wore no more bandages but the one across his chest, and one wrapped around a deeper gash on his upper right arm. He could see the bruises on his arms and shoulders and stomach and waist and hips, and when he turned, his back and shoulder blades, painting him a sickly sort of green. His face was torn up, the areas around the scabbed cuts green as well.

            At this point, he looked as if he’d gotten in a fight, which was a preferable way to look, in Nezumi’s opinion, than as if he’d been beaten repeatedly with a cement gun while strapped to a chair or unable to move on the floor.

            Nezumi scratched the bandage on his chest again. The carved skin beneath was scabbing, Karan had told him, more slowly than the cuts on his face but still healing in its steady way. Nezumi wondered if it really still needed a bandage, or if Karan just kept applying it so he wouldn’t see it, or so Shion wouldn’t see it.           

            Nezumi still did not know what it said. He did not ask Karan nor Shion. He touched the medical tape around the edges of the gauze, then started freeing it from his skin. He pulled all of it off so that the gauze was no longer taped down, and Nezumi merely held it to his chest. The square of gauze was maybe a half foot in length, not fully in the center of Nezumi’s chest, but a little toward the left. As if Momoe had started carving in the very center of his breastbone, and as she’d kept carving, the word or words or whatever it was had stretched left. As if she had not thought ahead or cared enough to keep her carving centered.

            Nezumi had no desire to think about Momoe and being spread on that concrete floor, pinned there by his arms and legs, hearing his own screams as if they were coming from someone else. Mostly, he did not think about her at all, but it was hard not to think about her when he peeled the untapped gauze from his chest, slowly because it stuck slightly to his skin, not looking away from the mirror as he did so.

            The words read backwards in the mirror. Despite this, Nezumi could still see how neatly the letters were, like a font, almost, and he was impressed by this in a strange way. He felt nothing at all, reading them, nothing but that mild feeling of being impressed by Momoe, who’d managed to carve him with font-like letters even when he thought he’d been writhing beneath her. He couldn’t imagine it’d been easy to carve words into skin, even with that little sharp knife she’d had, that silver knife.

            _The silver matches your eyes._

            Nezumi could hear the sound of Momoe’s voice in that moment more clearly even than the toilet’s quiet gurgling sounds beside him that always lasted a few minutes after it’d been flushed.

            Nezumi didn’t touch the words on his chest. They glistened along with the skin around them from the translucent cream Karan had spread onto them with the tips of two of her fingers. Neosporin, she’d told him, though he hadn’t asked.

            The knock on the door scared the shit out of Nezumi so that he jumped, slammed his hand to his chest, cursed below his breath at the pain of hitting the still tender carving.

            “Shit, what the fuck?” he demanded, not under his breath this time.

            “Are you okay? What are you doing in there for so long?” Shion asked from outside the door.

            “Taking a shit,” Nezumi said back. When he took his hand from his chest it was slimy with Neosporin. His heart beat so loud in his ears he had barely even heard Shion’s voice above it. He exhaled hard, stared at himself in the mirror, made himself see that he was not in that room, he was here, in Karan’s bathroom that had been Shion’s too, when he was a kid. The shower curtains had grinning blue and green fish on them that Nezumi stared at in the mirror, feeling calmer thinking of Shion as a child choosing this shower curtain design in some store.

            Nezumi couldn’t tell if Shion was still at the door or not. When his fingers stopped shaking, Nezumi lifted the square of gauze, placed it back over the words on his chest, pressed down the tape to his skin. He washed the Neosporin off his hands, dried them, and opened the bathroom door to find that Shion was still there.

            “You didn’t flush,” he said.

            “Yes, I did,” Nezumi said back.

            Shion slipped his arm around Nezumi’s waist, and Nezumi pulled away from him, but the movement hurt, and Shion didn’t let go.

            “I can walk on my own.”

            “I just like touching you,” Shion said, as they walked back to his room together.

            It was easier to walk when he could lean against Shion, but Nezumi pushed him away again anyway, even though his ribs seared as he did so.

            “I can walk,” he said again, harder, staring at Shion until he nodded.          

            “You can walk,” Shion agreed, and Nezumi returned to Shion’s bedroom, which had grown the stale smell of his own sweat and chicken noodle soup.

            Nezumi sat on the edge of the bed and scooched back, trying not to give any indication to Shion that his short trip to the bathroom had exhausted him. He was about to lie down when Shion crawled onto the bed beside him on his knees.

            “Your bandage,” he said, reaching out, and Nezumi looked down, saw that the tape on one side of the gauze had peeled back off, and the gauze had flapped open, exposing the carving on his chest.

            Shion’s fingers stopped inches from Nezumi’s chest. Nezumi glanced up from them, along Shion’s hand and arm and to his face, catching the moment where Shion’s expression dropped completely and all that was left was that blank slate that came over him sometimes.

            Nezumi wrapped one hand around Shion’s that was still outstretched and used the other to flip the gauze back in place, press the tape down to his skin again.

            “Hey, look at me,” he said, and Shion’s glazed eyes swept over his face in a detached way.

            Nezumi squeezed his hand harder.

            “Shion. We’re in your room. We’re safe here, remember?” Nezumi said, leaning forward, ignoring how tired his body was.

            He let go of Shion’s hand in order to cup his own palms around Shion’s face, wary as he watched Shion’s hollow expression harden, the blank of his eyes turning cold, angry.

            “Come back, professor, I’m right here.”

            Shion stared at him for a moment, and then he took a sharp intake of breath, blinking quickly, sadness softening his expression immediately.

            “Sorry,” he said quickly, jerking back as if to move away from Nezumi, but Nezumi kept his hands around Shion’s face and pulled him closer, enough to kiss briefly the corner of Shon’s lips.

            “Don’t apologize.”

            Nezumi kissed the bridge of Shion’s nose next, then his forehead, feeling Shion exhale onto his skin.

            “You okay?” Nezumi leaned away from Shion enough to look at him now, though he left his hands on Shion’s face, and Shion lifted his own hands, wrapped them loosely around Nezumi’s wrists.

            “I remember everything,” Shion said.

           It was Nezumi who jerked back this time, taking his hands from Shion’s face and freeing his wrists from Shion’s grip.

            “Nezumi. Maybe we need to talk about it.”

            Nezumi laid down, rolling onto his side and wincing at the flinch of his ribs.

            Broken ribs took up to two months to heal, according to Safu. Nezumi knew Safu was rarely wrong, and this annoyed him incredibly.

            “Nezumi,” Shion said, his hand on Nezumi’s shoulder. Nezumi curled his arm into his chest until Shion took his hand away.

            He stared at Shion’s wall. It was painted light blue. Shion had a poster taped up of Albert Einstein with his tongue sticking out and two quotes in English on both sides of his face. Nezumi could read English at a rudimentary level, stared at the words on the poster, tried to translate them. The first quote seemed to say something about not having talent – Nezumi was certain he must be translating that incorrectly – and something else about passion and being curious – which seemed more accurate for something Shion would have on his wall.

            “Do you ever think about why you have nightmares? You internalize. You push everything down, but it has to come out sometime. Even if you’re not thinking about it consciously, it comes out every night, I hear you screaming every night. Don’t you want to stop having nightmares about this?” Shion was asking, while Nezumi looked at the second quote.

            It was longer, and Nezumi translated the words _genius_ , _fish_ , _climb_ , _tree_ , _life_ , and _stupid_ before deciding he had likely forgotten all the English he’d ever tried to teach himself because there was no way Einstein spent his time talking about fish climbing trees and how stupid that was.

            Shion’s hand was again on Nezumi’s shoulder, this time pulling him until Nezumi was forced to roll onto his back or suffer more agony from his searing ribs.

            “Why aren’t your posters in Japanese?” he asked, before Shion could say anything.

            Shion blinked at him, then glanced at his wall. “Einstein was born in Germany.”

            “Then why the hell is that in English?”

            “That’s how they sold the poster. Do we have to talk about that now?” Shion laid down, though only halfway, propping himself up with his head on his hand and his elbow against the bed so he could look down at Nezumi, who turned just his head away from him, looking back at the poster.

            “You’re fluent in English, right?”      

            “I know you don’t want to think about it. But every night you have to relive it alone. Maybe if you just talked to me about it, let me carry some of the weight – ”

            “Is it really about fish climbing trees? The quote on the right?” Nezumi asked, looking at Shion again, and Shion sighed, let his head drop from his hand.

            He rested his chin on Nezumi’s arm, which hurt vaguely.

            “You have a bony chin, and I’m mildly bruised over here,” Nezumi pointed out.

            Shion lifted his chin up. “You’re not telling me because you’re worried I’ll freak out. Maybe I will, but you’ll calm me down again, and it’ll be better if I know – ”

            “Know what? There’s nothing to know that you don’t already. That psychotic girl beat the shit out of me, what else is there to know?”

            “I don’t know. Anything you want to tell me.”

            “I don’t want to tell you anything. I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t I get a say? They’re my nightmares, I’m perfectly fine with them. If it bothers you that I wake you up with my inconsiderate shouting, I never asked you to sleep here with me. Better yet, I’ll go back to my apartment and you won’t have to deal with it at all.”

            Shion frowned. “That’s not fair. You’re taking your anger out on me – ”

            “Yeah, cause it’s you I’m pissed at. I told you I don’t want to talk about this, and here you are insisting on talking about it. It’s my traumatic torture experience, isn’t it?”

            Shion sat up again, stared down at Nezumi. “No, actually, it’s not just your experience. It’s mine too, I was there too, I killed people, Nezumi, I didn’t aim for their legs or arms or shoulders or – I killed them, I remember it, I remember every single person I killed in that place – ”

            Nezumi sat up now too.

            Shion shook his head even though Nezumi hadn’t said anything, didn’t know if he could say anything. “I don’t regret it,” Shion said, almost angrily. “I had to get you out of there, and I did what I had to do, and I don’t regret any of that. But I still killed people, and I don’t want to deal with that alone, I want to deal with it with you, I want you to help me deal with this, okay? Maybe you don’t need me to get you through what happened in that place, but I need you to get me through it. So can you do that?”

            Shion’s anger now wasn’t the same as it had been when he wasn’t himself, when he seemed to vacate his own body and turn into someone cold and unfeeling. Shion’s anger now was the anger Nezumi had seen from him before, before the JBVIC, when he and Nezumi had fought about simple things.

            It was an anger Nezumi was not terrified of, and Nezumi reached out, tugged on the hem of Shion’s t-shirt because he wanted Shion closer to him. “Yes. I can do that.”

            Shion narrowed his eyes.

            “Come on. I’m serious. You can tell me, I won’t change the subject or pretend to fall asleep or anything,” Nezumi promised, letting go of Shion’s shirt to rest his hand around one of Shion’s crossed ankles.

            “But you won’t tell me what happened to you,” Shion said, after a moment.

            Nezumi let go of Shion’s ankle, scooched back on the bed until he was against the headboard, resting against it because he didn’t think he could sit up on his own any longer without collapsing.

            “It’s not that I don’t need you, professor,” he said quietly, while Shion got on his knees, crawled over to him and sat beside him against the headboard as well.

            Nezumi leaned against his side, watching Shion’s fingers slip through his own, their hands resting on Nezumi’s knee.

            “You like to talk about things. I don’t,” Nezumi said, finally, unable to think of any other excuse.

            “You told me about the Great Slaughter,” Shion said back.

            “After decades of not talking about it to anyone. Give me some time.”

            “But don’t you want the nightmares to stop? Don’t you want to stop reliving it every night?”

            “Who says talking about it will stop my nightmares?” Nezumi asked, tilting his head back against the headboard and staring up at Shion’s ceiling. He had glow-in-the-dark stars pasted up there in some sort of constellation, but they didn’t light up when the room was dark. They must have worn out years before. Nezumi liked to imagine Shion as a child in this room jumping on his bed to paste the stars up there so he could watch them before he fell asleep each night.

            “It might. I just don’t want you to feel alone in this. You’re not. You have me, you know that, you have me forever.”

            Nezumi closed his eyes. He could have fallen asleep in an instant but kept himself awake a little longer. “I know that,” he agreed.

            He felt Shion shift beside him, leaning closer against him, pressing against the bruises on Nezumi’s side, but Nezumi didn’t protest.

            He knew pain, and it was nothing like this.

*

Later that Sunday night, or maybe it was early Monday morning, Shion again woke to Nezumi’s shouting, and he thought he should be used to it by now, but he was not.

            The way Nezumi screamed filled up the entire room. Shion shook Nezumi’s shoulders, and the man fought him in his sleep, arms weak and hands grasping without direction so that Shion could easily ignore them.

            “Nezumi!”

            His own voice was nothing to the sound of Nezumi’s yells. It amazed Shion that Nezumi didn’t wake himself with his own screams. It amazed him that Nezumi could even yell so loudly, that anyone could yell so loudly, and then Nezumi’s eyes shot open and he quieted almost immediately, his flailing arms stilling.

            Shion pushed the hair that had plastered to Nezumi’s face off of it. He worried most that Nezumi’s ribs would never heal at this rate. Several were broken, and the only remedy was avoiding physical strain, but each night it seemed Nezumi strained them.

            “Just a nightmare,” Shion said, like he always did, lying back down beside Nezumi and letting Nezumi curl into him even though curling was probably not good for his broken ribs either.

            Nezumi nodded, his forehead wet with sweat and sliding against the skin of Shion’s upper arm just below the sleeve of his t-shirt. Nezumi’s arm slid around Shion’s waist and his fingers dug loosely into his skin, pushing Shion’s t-shirt so that it bunched over his navel.

            Shion listened to Nezumi’s quick breaths, felt these breaths right against the skin of his arm. He was on his back and tilted his head, seeing only the dark crown of Nezumi’s head, the mess of his hair that would be tangled in the morning the way it always was.

            While Nezumi’s breaths evened against his arm, Shion felt his own eyes burning. He blinked at his ceiling, liquid slipping out the corners of his eyes, trickling along the sides of his face and into his hair, one tear dipping coolly into his ear.

            Shion blinked quickly until all the water was out of his eyes. He waited to fall asleep again, the way he’d done every night since the JBVIC, staring up at his ceiling and listening to Nezumi breathe.

*


	25. Chapter 25

Because it was October, Karan had specials on all things pumpkin, and so the icing Nezumi was shaping into flowers was pumpkin flavored as well.

            It was difficult not to just quit his attempts and squeeze the entire icing bag into his own mouth, but Nezumi restrained himself, as Safu was watching him, though she was pretending not to be, averting her gaze every time Nezumi glanced at her.

            Nezumi was fine with this. At least she didn’t stare at him unabashedly like Shion did.

            “I saw _Hamlet_ last night,” Safu said, pouring pumpkin filling into a pie crust.

            “How’s my understudy?”

            “She was good.” Safu paused in scraping the bowl of pie filling with the side of her spatula. “Can’t pull off a dress the way you can, though, of course,” she added, with a glance at Nezumi.

            “Not many people can,” Nezumi replied.

            Safu smiled faintly, wiped the spatula with the side of her finger, then the side of her finger with the spatula again so that the last of the filling went into the crust.

            Nezumi looked down at his roses again. He was getting back into the hang of it, but his wrist was still not used to hours of baking. Nezumi rolled his hand, wondering if his arm had healed completely after all since Shion had broken it.

            He was examining his wrist when Safu spoke again.

            “Do you know what it says?”

            “What? Happy anniversary?” Nezumi asked, looking back at the cake to double check that he’d written it out correctly.

            “What that Vamp Hunter carved into you.”

            Nezumi ignored the clench of his stomach. “Oh. Yeah. And I don’t have any desire to talk about it. Did Shion put you up to this?”       

            “No. He actually told me not to try to talk to you about anything,” Safu replied, pushing her hair from her cheek with the back of her wrist.

            “You should try listening to him.”

            “There’s scar creams. Good ones, you could try them, I could get you one if you’d like.”

            Nezumi put down his icing back, leaned his elbows against the counter. He sat on a stool from the front room that Karan had brought into the kitchen and insisted he use. “I don’t really care about it.”          

            “I didn’t think you would. Shion does.”

            “He shouldn’t, it’s my chest, not his. It’s not like it’s a lie anyway,” Nezumi said, and a second passed before Safu laughed abruptly, a laugh so sudden and loud that Nezumi stared at her.

            She waved at hand at him, catching her breath. “Sorry, sorry. You should try saying that to Shion.”

            “I don’t think he’d find it as amusing as you did.”

            “He might. Or might not. Probably not,” Safu conceded, exhaling heavily and still smiling slightly. “I am glad you’re okay, you know. Most people would be psychologically damaged after going through something like that.”

            Nezumi didn’t reply. Picked up the icing bag again and immediately his wrist felt hot, the muscles in it twitching until he put the bag back down.

            “I do have a PhD in psychology,” Safu said quietly, and Nezumi glared at her swiftly.

            “I knew he recruited you.”

            “He didn’t _recruit_ me, you’re my friend too!”

            Nezumi laughed. “Since when?”

            Safu had her hands on her hips. “Why do you always have to be the tough guy? Doesn’t it get tiring? It certainly tires me. And Shion, he’s told me you keep him up all night with your shouting – ”

            “That’s nice,” Nezumi snapped, getting off the goddamn stool he didn’t even need.

            “I didn’t mean it like that – He didn’t say it like that – Nezumi!”

            Nezumi shoved the swinging door open and then jumped back, realizing he’d nearly smacked Karan in the face with it.

            “Shit, sorry,” he breathed, as Karan caught the door and blinked at him.

            “Oh, that’s fine, the number of times I’ve almost hit Safu or Shion with this door,” she said, smiling lightly. Her eyes slipped over Nezumi’s face carefully, and he wanted to step out of her gaze, but she was blocking the doorway, and he didn’t want to step back in the kitchen with Safu. “Are you all right, honey?”

            “I’m great. Bathroom,” Nezumi said, stepping aside so Karan could walk into the kitchen.

            She did so only after a moment more of looking at Nezumi, and then Nezumi left the kitchen, headed up the stairs to Shion’s room and grabbed his keys and wallet, which was stained with his own blood. He left the phone that Shion had bought him a few days before. Now, Nezumi was part of the family plan Shion and Karan and Safu shared. Shion hadn’t given him a say in the matter.

            He shoved his feet in his boots and realized he was still wearing an apron, tore it off and threw it on Shion’s floor before leaving his room, heading back downstairs, walking past the kitchen and out of the bakery.

            Two and a half weeks had passed since he’d been at Karan’s bakery. He’d been outside sparingly, taking walks with Shion only for about a week now, never for longer than twenty minutes, never anywhere far, and never on his own.

            Nezumi headed not to Shion’s campus, where the professor would be teaching his Wednesday afternoon class, but to the subway station, tapping his blood-splattered subway pass on the reader and clutching his side as if to hold in the pain of his ribs as he waited for the subway train.

            It was mid-October and colder than Nezumi had expected, just as cold as it was outside in the subway station, and Nezumi wore only a t-shirt. At the very least, all of his bruises had faded and disappeared, and his only visible injuries were the cuts on his face and a few scabbed gashes over his arms. Nezumi felt his broken ribs pulsing in his chest and tried to even out his breathing. When he got on the subway train, it was crowded and Nezumi was elbowed and gasped, clenching his teeth, closing his eyes, reaching up to grab a hanging strap and finding the movement elicited even more pain.         

            Nezumi stared at the advertisement posters plastered along the top of the train, clenching and unclenching his fist around the hanging strap until he got used to the pain, enough to ignore it.

            By the time the train was at his stop, Nezumi felt winded, but it was better than being stuck in that bakery. Goosebumps pricked his arms as he headed out the crowded train, out the station, and onto the street, walking the familiar route to his apartment building.

            He took the stairs inside his building just to prove to himself he could do it, to prove to himself that the pain was nothing he couldn’t handle, to prove to himself that Shion and Karan and Safu were all wrong, that two and a half weeks was more than long enough to heal, and Nezumi didn’t need to be coddled, that he was fine and there was no reason for him to be stuck in that bakery being looked after and pitied and taken care of.

            His breaths came in gasps by the time he was at his apartment door, but he tuned out the sounds of his own labored breathing and unlocked the door, swung in open, froze in the doorway.

            Shion had been steadily bringing more and more of his belongings to the bakery, despite Nezumi’s protests. He’d been in Nezumi’s apartment, so he’d seen this, but he hadn’t mentioned any of it.

            Nezumi walked slowly through his apartment, taking in the destruction of it, the mess of his sparse belongings that covered the floor. Even his mattress had been ripped apart, Nezumi noted at the doorway of his bedroom.

            He didn’t bother walking into the room. He leaned against the doorway and caught his breath and concentrated on the pain of his ribs, letting the sharp stabs that occurred with each inhale distract him from the mess of his home.

            Not that it had ever been a home, in any sense outside of a physical place to sleep. But it had been his. His first apartment, the first place he’d ever felt safe after living on the street for years of his childhood, the first place that had been a home at all, unremarkable as it was, since his real home had been taken from him in the Great Slaughter.

            Nezumi didn’t want to depend on Shion for a home as well. He didn’t want to stay in that bakery another night. He left the bedroom and returned to the living room and took note that his couch was just as ruined as his mattress, not a much better option in terms of where he might sleep.

            He went to the bathroom simply to look at what had been done to it, observed the ruin of it blankly, and as he opened drawers absentmindedly, it suddenly occurred to him that amongst the Vamp Hunters that had destroyed his apartment, Momoe had been here too. She’d mentioned it, being in his closet, looking for the stolen blood.

            Nezumi froze, closed the empty drawer he’d opened and left the bathroom and returned to the bedroom and went in it this time, walked slowly to the closet, stepping on his own clothes as he did so and hardly noticing.

            He opened the door of the closet and realized only after he did so that he’d been holding his breath. That a part of him had expected to find Momoe inside it, crouched down, grinning at him, holding her little silver knife and giggling.

            Nezumi’s knees gave out on him, and he blamed it on the pain and the pain only, and he crouched in front of his open closet and stared inside of it and tried to pull himself together.

            He couldn’t sleep in this apartment. He couldn’t come back here. He’d end the lease and find somewhere else, somewhere Momoe had never been, a monster in his closet that he knew no matter how much he reasoned with himself, he’d always fear finding every time he opened his closet doors.

            Nezumi covered his eyes with his hands, pressing his closed eyelids with the cool bases of his palms. “Get your shit together,” he whispered, and then he stood up abruptly, clutched his side and exhaled hard at the pain, and left his bedroom.

            He didn’t bother picking up any of the clothing or books Shion hadn’t brought to the bakery yet. He left everything and locked the apartment door behind him and doubted he’d ever step foot in it again.

            When he walked to the elevator, not able to fool himself that he could handle the stairs any longer, the doors opened even before Nezumi pressed the button.

            “Oh, my god.”

            Nezumi’s neighbor clutched the side of the elevator doorway as if she might fall without it, which was unfortunate, as it prevented Nezumi from being able to get on the elevator.

            “Hey,” he said, not able to think of anything else to offer the girl, whose eyes and mouth were both open wide. She almost resembled a cartoon character, which wasn’t helped by her clothes – a bright pink jumpsuit type of thing that Nezumi thought made her look a bit like a pink janitor. The bottom part of the jumpsuit was shorts, revealing striped blue-and-white socks that came up to her thighs.

            Her long hair was in pigtails, too, like Momoe’s had been the day she decided she was done with the gun, the day she decided to use her little silver knife instead.

            “Are you okay?” the girl asked, and Nezumi realized he hadn’t been breathing and did so abruptly, making himself nod.

            “Yeah,” he said, but the word just came out a breath, hardly any sound at all.

            “You have to tell someone,” Nezumi’s neighbor said, leaning forward a little bit. The elevator door tried to close, but her hand was still on the side of it, and it jerked back with a grumble after sliding forward only an inch against her palm.

            Nezumi had no idea what she was talking about. He just wanted to get away from her. He wanted to be at the bakery, wished he was in Shion’s bedroom, wished he’d never left, wished Shion’s class was over and the man was next to him.

            “Tell someone what?” Nezumi asked, since the girl didn’t seem inclined to move out of the way.

            “Domestic abuse is a cycle. Even if he told you he was sorry, even if he told you it won’t happen again, even if he told he loves you, he isn’t and it will and he doesn’t, not the way you deserve.”

            Nezumi could hardly make any sense of the girl’s emphatic words. She leaned forward as she spoke every word so that by the end of it, her upper body was pitched forward completely out of the elevator, and just her hands gripping the inside of the elevator’s open doorway seemed to be keeping her standing upright.

            “What the hell are you talking about?” Nezumi asked, completely bewildered, wanting to sit down because the effort it took not to curl into the increasingly piercing pain of his ribs was taking nearly everything he had.

            “Love doesn’t have to come at a price,” the girl insisted, looking almost pained herself. “You’re not supposed to endure pain in order to be loved, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

            The elevator tried to close on her again, and this time it must have taken her by surprise, as the girl jumped forward, out of the elevator, letting the doors close and nearly falling into Nezumi, who stepped back out of her way, letting her catch her own balance.

            Nezumi considered the girl, who stood almost out of breath in front of him, hands on her sock-covered knees. She looked up at him despite being bent over, and despite her pigtails and age and everything about her that was so like Momoe, her expression was not.

            She looked, if anything, vulnerable.

            She stood up fully again, seeming flustered now, pulling on one of her pigtails and rubbing the back of her neck. “Sorry. I – Sorry, I don’t know what just came over me. I just – I’ve been in the same situation, and it makes me so angry and upset, and I – I’m sorry.”

            _Domestic abuse._ Understanding came to Nezumi in an instant as he remembered what he looked like, the cuts on his cheeks and down his eyebrow and along the bridge of his nose and the curve of his jaw that no longer caught him by surprise when he looked in the mirror, that were familiar to him now, that Shion traced sometimes at night, that he kissed briefly, one by one, as if he was counting them with his lips, taking inventory of Nezumi’s torn flesh.

            Nezumi no longer wore a bandage over the cuts on his chest. He slept in t-shirts so Shion wouldn’t have to see it, and when they had sex – which Shion had only just started allowing again, making Nezumi promise not to move too much, to let Shion do most of the work – Nezumi kept his shirt on still, and Shion never tried to take it off.

            “It’s okay,” Nezumi said, instead of correcting the girl, who looked almost like she might cry. He didn’t necessarily want her to think Shion was hitting him, but he didn’t plan on ever coming into this building again, doubted he’d see her again, and he had a feeling telling her he wasn’t actually being hit wouldn’t go over well. She’d probably think he was just in denial, trying to hide it, and Nezumi couldn’t handle the effort of going through that conversation.

            The girl’s shoulders slumped. She nodded, tugged her pigtail again, then shuffled past Nezumi, who stepped forward to press the elevator button again.

            It opened immediately, and Nezumi got in, turned to watch his neighbor walk down the hall, stop at her door.

            She stared blankly at it, then glanced back at Nezumi, who lifted his hand, waved at her and smiled, hoping the gesture might comfort her a bit.

            “Thanks, neighbor,” he offered, wanting to give her something, wondering who’d hit her and how long it’d been until she’d gotten out of that situation and why he’d never noticed her coming back home with bruises.

            Maybe they’d been hidden. Maybe he just hadn’t paid attention.

            The door closed just as his neighbor lifted her hand and waved back.

            Nezumi’s neighbor was more or less a stranger, but even so, Nezumi felt vaguely unsettled learning this about her past. He almost wanted to stay in the elevator when it opened at the lobby of his building, ride it back up to his floor and make her tell him who had hurt her so he could find that asshole and deal with them properly, but the idea was ridiculous, and Nezumi got out the elevator.

            Nezumi crossed the lobby and left the building and took the subway. He got out at the stop before the bakery, weaved among the mostly college students to get to the exit of the subway station, leaned against the railing at the escalators that led out the station and was glad they were not out of order as they often were, and then he was on the street.

            It was a quick walk to the building where Shion was teaching a seminar. Nezumi knew his classroom number because Shion had seen fit to send Nezumi a copy of his class schedule.

            _For emergencies,_ he’d said, and it wasn’t an emergency, and Nezumi couldn’t think of an emergency that would make him need to barge into Shion’s seminar, but he was glad to have memorized the information now at any rate.

            He didn’t wear a watch and stopped a student walking by to ask the time, learned it was a few minutes past the end of Shion’s seminar and wondered if he’d still be in the room. He got to the right building and had to take more stairs and thought he might collapse on them, wrapped his arm around his ribs and finally made it to Shion’s classroom. The door was open, and a student was talking to Shion at his desk. It wasn’t a lecture hall, but a small classroom with chairs that had desks attached to them and a larger wooden desk in front of them all.

            Nezumi leaned against the doorframe, watched Shion talk to the boy at his desk about something to do with an essay deadline that Nezumi mostly tuned out, and then the boy turned and saw Nezumi in the doorway and stared at him but left the room anyway.

            Nezumi stepped into the classroom when the student was gone, closed the door behind him and leaned against it. Shion was immediately in front of him, tucking Nezumi’s hair behind his ears, cupping Nezumi’s face.

            “Hey, hi, you’re here, what’s going on?” Shion said, and Nezumi wrapped his arms around Shion’s waist, pulled the man to him and held him against his chest, ducked his face into the side of Shion’s neck.

            “Nothing,” he murmured, shaking his head, feeling Shion’s fingers comb through his hair. He tightened his hold on Shion, bringing Shion’s body closer against his own, and Shion didn’t protest.

            “I missed you,” the professor said, even though it could not have been more than two hours that had passed since Shion left Nezumi icing a cake in the bakery to go to his lecture.

            Shion smelled like shampoo and chalk, and Nezumi had no idea why he was using chalk in this day and age, but he liked the smell of it. Nezumi breathed him in and didn’t want to exhale him out again. His ribs stopped aching with Shion’s body flush against his own. Everything stopped hurting, and he felt himself relax, let Shion hold up most of his weight.

            Shion was stronger than him now. Still skinny, but no longer gaunt, no longer unhealthy. He was sturdy and felt more solid than Nezumi recognized, his body more substantial against Nezumi’s than Nezumi remembered it ever being.

            “My neighbor thinks you hit me,” Nezumi said, not lifting his head from Shion’s neck and shoulder, the folded-down fabric of Shion’s button down shirt collar caught against his own cheek.

            “Your neighbor?” Shion asked, and Nezumi nodded. “You went to your apartment?”

            “Yeah,” Nezumi said.

            “I’m sorry.”

            “It’s not your fault.”

            Shion pulled away from him then, only so that they could look at each other, but their bodies stayed pressed together, Shion’s holding him securely against the closed door Nezumi leaned on.

            “You stole that blood for me. All of this is my fault.”

            “Do you really believe that?”

            Shion unwound one of his arms from Nezumi’s waist, touched Nezumi’s jawline where Nezumi knew there was a scabbed cut stretched in a long line. Nezumi could remember the hit of the Vamp Hunter gun that split his skin here, the way blood had gushed forth and Nezumi had tried to catch it all in his hands, felt it seep through his fingers and color the back of his hands and trail warmly along his wrists.

            “If I was human, you’d be whole and unhurt.”

            “It’s useless to think in hypotheticals.”

            “I’m a danger to everyone in my life. I shouldn’t have let you in, I shouldn’t have let you love me,” Shion insisted, and Nezumi had to smile at this, at the idiot in front of him.

            “Do you really think you could have stopped me, professor?” he asked, but Shion’s gaze stayed worried.

            His eyes were brown, of course, all vamp traits hidden since he was at work. He’d let Nezumi help him dye his hair, and Nezumi had sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat, Shion on the edge of his tub, close enough that Nezumi could lean forward and run his dye-covered, gloved fingers against Shion’s white roots and his eyebrows. He’d let Shion dye his eyelashes on his own, scared to get dye in Shion’s eyes.

            “I should have stayed away from you,” Shion said quietly, his fingers falling from Nezumi’s face.

            Nezumi tightened his arms around Shion’s waist. “You definitely should not have.”

            “I’ll always be a vamp. This isn’t something that goes away. They’ll always want me dead.”       

            “And I’ll always want you right here,” Nezumi argued. “That’s more important.”

            “Is it?” Shion asked vaguely, eyes slipping from Nezumi’s and trailing over his face, lowering to his chest, and the words on Nezumi’s chest were covered by his t-shirt, but Nezumi knew that hardly mattered.

            Nezumi thought about what Safu had said in the bakery. Didn’t want to take his arms from Shion’s waist in order to tilt Shion’s gaze back to his face, so he leaned forward, nudged Shion’s nose with his own to make the man look at him.

            Shion looked up in a startled way and touched the tip of his nose.

            “Did you just hit my nose with yours?”

            “It doesn’t justify the words being carved into me, but they’re not a lie. Momoe carved them into me because she thought I should be ashamed, but I’m not, and I refuse to be.”

            “This isn’t about you being ashamed. It’s about you being in danger. It’s not about the words that she carved into you, it’s about you having words carved into you in the first place, and I’m the reason for that!” Shion protested, trying to move back from Nezumi now, but Nezumi refused to release him.

            “A psychotic sadist Vamp Hunter is the reason for that,” Nezumi corrected.

            “What will they do to you next? I never killed her, that Momoe, that torturer. I wanted to, but she had disappeared, and I didn’t have time to look for her, I had to get you out – ”

            Nezumi’s arms had loosened around Shion without his notice. He leaned back against the door, glad it was behind him, glad he didn’t have to rely on his own legs to keep him up.

            “ – and you’re right, she’s psychotic and sadistic and she hates vamp sympathizers just as much as she hates vamps, probably more, and it’s not like you’re hiding, it’s not like she doesn’t know how to find you, she’ll come after you, and I don’t know what she’ll do to you next, what if she – what if she – what if – ”

            “It’s been nearly three weeks. She’s not coming after me. She never wanted me, she wanted you, she only tortured me to get information on you,” Nezumi said, trying to keep his voice even. He did not want to think about what Momoe could do to him if she came after him again. He wouldn’t let her do anything to him. He’d kill her first.

            “Fine, maybe you’re right, she just wanted me, and nothing has changed!” Shion shouted. “Vamp Hunting is not a job for her. It’s a passion, she literally carved words into your skin, Nezumi! People don’t do that, even Vamp Hunters don’t do that. You’re human, they don’t do that to humans, they leave humans alone! But she didn’t because she’s insane, and when she comes after me, she’ll find you too, and she’ll hurt you again – why wouldn’t she?”

            “Shion, you have to keep it down, you can’t shout about being a vamp in a public place,” Nezumi said, trying to make his voice gentle but insistent, putting his hands on Shion’s shoulders.

            “You’re not being rational!” Shion shouted, flinching out of Nezumi’s grip. “You’re not even letting yourself think about what happened to you! You want to pretend nothing happened, you want to pretend we can be safe and happy and together forever, since when did you turn away from reality? Since when did you believe in fairy tales? Is it that you think I’m the only person in the world who can ever love you? Is that why you’re staying with me? Is that why you’re forgiving me? I’m not your only option, Nezumi, leaving me won’t mean you have to be alone, you can find someone else, someone better, someone human, someone who won’t be responsible for a fucking engravement in your skin!”

            Nezumi raised his hands, palms up. Shion was among the desks now, had nearly tripped over one because as he’d been shouting at Nezumi he’d been walking backwards, away from him.

            Part of Nezumi wanted to open the door he leaned against, check behind him that the hallway was empty. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t look away from Shion’s hard gaze.

            “Professor, you have to calm down – ”

            “Just because your life has been hard and terrible for so long doesn’t mean you can’t have anything better,” Shion said, no longer shouting but not speaking quietly either.         

            Nezumi stepped away from the door. “You’re right, let’s talk about this at home – ”

            “Are you a masochist? Is that it?” Shion demanded, still nearly shouting, and Nezumi stepped back again, not sure the best way to get Shion to shut the hell up.

            “Shion, this is your place of work, remember – ”

            “I don’t care about this job! I care about your life even though you won’t do it for yourself! I love you, I love you so much, I do, but that’s not worth dying for, I’m not worth dying for, I’m not worth this, I can’t be the reason they hurt you again, I can’t be the reason – ”

            Nezumi forgot he was supposed to be calming Shion down. “I thought we got through this, I thought we established none of this shit is your fault – ”

            “Whose fault is it then?” Shion shouted. “When you scream every night, whose fault is that?”

            “Professor, seriously, lower your voice before – ”

            “Every night I have to hear you relive the torture I put you through. I carved those words into your skin. I did that,” Shion said, and he was no longer shouting. His voice had dropped with each word until he’d only sounded winded, and the moment he stopped speaking he collapsed into the chair next to him, pressed his elbows to the desk and held his head in his hands, his fingers weaving through his hair that Nezumi had dyed. “I did that,” he said again, a whisper now.

            Nezumi stared at him for a moment, then walked closer, choosing the desk in front of Shion’s that allowed him to turn around in his seat and face Shion.

            Shion blinked dully at him. He was not crying. He looked only tired.

            “Think of all the times we’ve been happy together since we’ve known each other. Do they even come close to the amount of times we haven’t been happy? That one of us has been hurt or miserable or scared? That you’ve been in pain?” Shion said quietly.

            Nezumi leaned closer to him. Rested his own elbows on Shion’s desk, let them touch Shion’s elbows, cupped his chin in one of his palms so Shion’s face was hardly inches form his own. “I don’t care about that comparison. When I think of all the times I’ve been happy since knowing you, I compare that to the number of times I’ve been happy my whole life before you. How can I make you understand how much you’ve changed my life? I thought you were a genius, why is it so hard to make you see that you are not a sacrifice to me?”

            “Momoe wasn’t a sacrifice?” Shion asked, dropping his arms to the desk and leaning away from Nezumi, sitting back in his chair.

            Nezumi dropped his own hands to the desk. “You’ve got to stop bringing her up, I can’t keep having this conversation with you.”

            “I can’t just ignore what she did to you. I can’t just ignore what could happen any day now.”

            “It’s been two and a half weeks since you got me out of there. Maybe she’s moved on. Found another person to practice her penmanship on.”

            Shion sighed. “I’ve been thinking I’d go back there. Find her and get rid of her, but there will always be more Momoe’s – ”

            “Go back there?” Nezumi demanded, sitting up to stare at Shion fully. “Get rid of her? Do you think you’re some assassin now? Shit, Shion, listen to what you’re saying, you can never go back there, do you understand me?”

            Shion looked at him calmly. “Nothing happened to me there.”

            Nezumi pointed at him. “Don’t go thinking you’re invincible. And don’t think you can make a habit out of killing people.”

            “It’s not a habit. It’s necessary.”

            “It’s definitely not necessary. You’re not a murderer. You shot those Vamp Hunters out of self-defense, that’s different than intentionally going to Vamp Hunter Headquarters for no reason at all but to kill someone. That’s not who you are.”

            “She’s not just _someone_ – ”

            Nezumi slammed his hand on the desk to shut Shion up. He leaned forward again, made sure Shion was paying full attention. “I can’t do this. I can’t talk about Momoe every second of every day with you. If she shows up, if any Vamp Hunter shows up, we’ll deal with it then. Until that point, if it ever even comes, you need to stop thinking about her and making me think about her. You need to stop thinking about all of that and feeling guilty for it. I’ve lived the part of my life that was without you, and that’s over now, and I’m so goddamn relieved for that, so you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have any desire to try out life without you again. Either break up with me yourself, or let’s just go the fuck home. I’m goddamn desperate for that bedrest you’re always going on about.”

            When Nezumi stopped speaking, Shion seemed to deflate, his shoulders dropping. He did not look at all cheered up, did not look any less upset, but to Nezumi’s surprise, he didn’t object. “Let’s go home,” Shion said, and he stood up, so Nezumi did too, followed him out of the classroom where, to Nezumi’s relief, the hallway was empty.

            They returned to the bakery without incident, and Nezumi used the bathroom and opted out of a shower, knowing it was more likely than not that he’d collapse in there.

            He hadn’t eaten but for a few muffins at breakfast and pastries he’d swiped while baking before going to his apartment, but Nezumi was more exhausted than he was hungry. He stripped to his boxers the moment he returned to Shion’s room, climbing into bed and letting his body crumble.

            He realized he was shirtless only after Shion sat on the bed beside him, holding a stack of essays and a banana and looking down at Nezumi’s chest.

            Nezumi looked too, then started to push himself up. “I forgot – ”

            “It’s okay,” Shion said quietly, a hand on Nezumi’s shoulder, so Nezumi laid back down, on his back so he could look up at Shion, who settled cross-legged beside him.

            “I can put on a shirt,” Nezumi insisted, but Shion shook his head even though his eyes were still on the words.

            “Can I touch it?”

            Nezumi nodded, and Shion reached out, touched Nezumi’s chest, the skin around the scabs and then the letters themselves.

            “It’s right over your heart,” Shion whispered. He looked like he might cry, and Nezumi’s chest tightened. “If you don’t start putting on scar cream from now, it could be on you forever.”

            “That would be fine with me,” Nezumi said. He meant it. He wasn’t sure if Shion understood that he meant it. He looked down at his chest again because he hated Shion’s expression.

             Shion’s forefinger was on the last letter, tracing down the last line.

            “ _Vamp lover._ ” Shion read the words softly, below his breath, then took his finger from Nezumi’s skin.  

            “Hey, look at me,” Nezumi said, because Shion still looked at his chest.

            Shion’s eyes slid slowly to Nezumi’s face. Nezumi pushed himself up onto his elbows, caught Shion’s hand and pressed it to the words again, this time the flat of his palm to cover them, and Shion didn’t even try to pull back. His palm was warm against Nezumi’s chest.

            “As long as those words are there, they’ll be true. Do you understand?”

            “You could love anyone instead of me, and live a better life,” Shion said back, his voice quiet still and hollow.

            He still had his contacts in and his scar covered, and Nezumi wished he didn’t. He loved the Shion with brown eyes and no scar, but he loved the Shion with red eyes and a scar just as much. He loved every Shion, even stupid Shion, as he was right in that moment, the stupidest Shion Nezumi had ever encountered in the almost-year since he’d known the man.

            “You know how I feel about hypotheticals,” Nezumi said. “I can’t love anyone else. I can’t live any other life but this one, with you. Why waste your time thinking about a world where any of that is possible?”

            “It is possible.”

            “I assure you, it’s not. Who’s the known liar in this relationship? You or me?”

            Shion looked at him for a long moment before replying, softly, “Me.”

            “That’s right. So who should we believe now?”

            “You,” Shion said. His fingers curled gently against Nezumi’s chest where his hand still sat. The scars on Nezumi’s chest didn’t hurt to be touched anymore. They’d scabbed over completely, and Nezumi had to constantly refrain from picking at the scabs.

            “Right again, professor. So can I sleep now?”

            Shion’s expression hadn’t changed. He still looked like he might cry, but he didn’t. Instead, he took his hand from Nezumi’s chest, reached for the banana on the essays in front of him and held it out for Nezumi.

            “You should eat this, you haven’t eaten all day.”

            Nezumi leaned back down, off his elbows. “I’ll have it when I wake up.”

            “Have you taken any pain meds today?” Shion asked, and Nezumi closed his eyes.

            “I’m fine. Let me sleep.”

            “Did you brush your teeth?”

            “On second thought, give me the banana,” Nezumi said, not opening his eyes, holding out his hand, and he felt when Shion placed the banana in it.

            Nezumi curled his fingers around the fruit, then threw it at Shion without looking, hearing only the thump of it and Shion’s gentle, “Ow.”

            “Any more questions?”

            “That hit my clavicle.”

            “It’s a banana. You’re a vamp. I’m sure the banana is the bruised party in this particular altercation,” Nezumi said back, rolling onto his side toward Shion so that when Shion went to bed too, they’d fall asleep facing each other.

            There was silence for a moment, and then the sound of shuffling papers, and Nezumi knew Shion had turned to the essays he had to grade.

            Right in that moment, his ribs aching to the point of near-numbness, and Shion beside him, probably trying not to cry as he graded his students’ papers, Nezumi wasn’t sure if he was happy.

            But he was home. And that was all Nezumi had been looking for since it’d been taken away from him, twenty-one years before. Now that he had it again, he’d never give it up.

*


	26. Chapter 26

Shion hadn’t known how to bring up the idea of getting an apartment together with Nezumi, and thus was relieved when Nezumi was the one who brought it up.

            It was Monday night, just over a month since the events at the JBVIC. Shion didn’t know what to make of the fact that no Vamp Hunters had come after him yet. He wondered if the government had lied to Vamp Hunters as well – somehow convinced them that even after Shion had escaped Vamp Hunter headquarters, he’d been caught and killed by some government faction separate from the Japanese Bureau of Vampire Investigation and Control. He doubted Vamp Hunters would buy this, just as he doubted Vamp Hunters would leave him alone just because the government was content to do so.

            Despite his worries that Shion kept silent after the week before when Nezumi had made clear he wasn’t going to discuss them any further, Shion did want to try to move on with his life as best he could. And that meant leaving his childhood bedroom above the bakery.

            Shion still had his own apartment, but it was small for one person. It would be incredibly small for two people, especially because Nezumi would be spending most of his time there while he still recovered from his broken ribs. And, after living together in his childhood bedroom for so many weeks, Shion thought it might be strange if they just moved into separate apartments again. It made sense, really, just to get a place of their own.

            Shion built these arguments in his head, rehearsed them and thought about Nezumi’s possible reactions, devised arguments to combat Nezumi’s most likely protests.

            But then, while they folded laundry on the floor of Shion’s childhood bedroom Monday night before bed, Nezumi was the one to bring it up.

            “I love living with your mother, but you realize we have to move out at some point, right?” he said, and Shion glanced at him to see he was holding up one of Karan’s bras by the strap.

            “I do realize that,” Shion said slowly, watching Nezumi fold the bra in half and place it on the pile of his mother’s clothes. “I think you’re well enough that we can move out sometime this week. There’s my apartment…”

            Nezumi hummed, a noncommittal sound. He picked up a pair of Shion’s jeans from the laundry basket and folded them long-ways, then at the knees, then once more before placing them on Shion’s pile.

            “Your apartment is small,” Nezumi said. “Too small for two people. You don’t even have a real kitchen.”          

            “I know you’re going to say you feel fine enough to live on your own, but I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Shion said quickly, trying to remember all the points he’d made in his head.

            “I didn’t say I wanted to live alone,” Nezumi said back, which was not one of the reactions Shion had drafted his own rebuttal for.

            Shion stopped rifling through the basket in search of the duplicate of the sock he was holding. “What are you saying?”

            “I’m not renewing my lease. It’s bi-monthly anyway, so it’s easy to get rid of. I told my landlord my last month is October, which means in a week and a half, I won’t have an apartment anymore.”

            “But you don’t want to move into my apartment,” Shion said, to clarify. He’d prepared for Nezumi objecting to moving into a new apartment together. He had not prepared for Nezumi suggesting it, and was not entirely sure that was what was happening currently.

            “When’s your lease up?”

            “The new year.”

            “You’re in a prime spot for university students. Couldn’t you sublet the next two months?”

            “I could try,” Shion hedged. “And then we both won’t have anywhere to live.”

            “How could we possibly solve that problem?” Nezumi asked dryly, picking up the sock Shion had been looking for before he’d gotten distracted. “I believe that sock in your hand belongs to this one.”

            “You want to get a place together?” Shion asked.

            “I want that sock,” Nezumi said, so Shion handed it to him.

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi folded the socks together, not looking at Shion, his bangs falling forward to shield his eyes. “If I got my own place, I’d sleep over at yours all the time anyway. It’s a waste of money.”

            “Forget about the money.”

            “Unlike you, I can’t just forget about money.”

            “It’s very costly being a vamp, I definitely have less money than you do,” Shion reminded.

            “What is this, a competition?” Nezumi asked.

            Shion wrapped his fingers around the edge of the laundry basket sitting between them. “Disregarding, for just a moment, the monetary benefits, this is what you want? To get a place together? Someplace that’s ours?”

            “I guess if we’re both signing the lease and living there, that will make it ours, won’t it?” Nezumi asked back.

            “So that’s what you want?”

            “Aren’t I the one who just suggested it?”

            Shion thought back. “I can’t remember. Did you suggest it or did I?”

            Nezumi shook his head, threw a balled pair of socks at Shion, who caught it before it could hit his face. “Stop being annoying and just tell me if I should look for an apartment for just myself or both of us.”

            Shion squeezed the balled pair of socks, tried to contain the warmth spreading through his chest. “Both of us. I’ll see about subletters for my place, but it’s really just November and December left. If I can’t find anyone to take it, we can live there temporarily and start a lease at our new place in January.”

            “That’s fine,” Nezumi said, reaching back into the laundry basket without looking in it, and Shion could hear his fingernails scrape the bottom.

            He pulled out his hand and looked into the basket.

            “It’s empty.”

            They stood up, Nezumi taking Karan’s clothes to her bedroom, and Shion starting to put away his own and Nezumi’s in his childhood dresser.

            He paused halfway, holding a stack of Nezumi’s t-shirts against his chest and peering at the dresser, inspecting the drawers with a detail he never had before and wondering if they could bring it to their new apartment, or if Nezumi would want to bring the dresser from his apartment, or if they would want to buy a new one, something they picked out together.

*

Two days after they discussed moving in together, Shion somehow found a student who wanted to sublet his apartment for all of November and December, which gave them the single week remaining of October to find a new apartment to move into in order to prevent cramming both Nezumi’s and Shion’s belongings into the bakery.

            Not that they had, collectively, many belongings. But Nezumi still treated the apartment search urgently. He wanted to be out of the bakery. He wanted to move on, to put the aftermath of the JBVIC incident behind them.

            It was midnight Wednesday night when Shion groaned from his side of the bed.

            “Does your laptop screen have to be so bright?” he muttered.

            “Look at this one,” Nezumi said, turning the laptop on his knee so that the glow of the screen lit up Shion’s profile, the way his dark hair was scattered against the pillow and his eyes were shut tight.

            “I’ll look in the morning.”

            “It’s officially morning, it’s twelve o’ one.”

            Shion groaned again, but he sat up beside Nezumi, leaning heavily against him and rubbing his eyes. His body was warm from sleep, and Nezumi turned to press his lips to Shion’s t-shirted shoulder while Shion dropped his hands from his eyes, looked at the screen.

            “Well?” Nezumi spoke the word into Shion’s shoulder so his voice came out muffled.

            Shion leaned closer to the screen, so Nezumi turned, looked at it too and watched Shion scroll.

            “Why is it a two bedroom?”

            “In case you annoy me.”

            “It’s as cheap as a one bedroom,” Shion murmured, lifting the laptop off Nezumi’s lap and balancing it on his own loosely crossed legs. He leaned even closer to it so his back was hunched, his face inches from the screen.

            “Karan could stay in the other bedroom if she’s over late,” Nezumi suggested. “Or Safu.”

            “There’s a washer and dryer in the unit,” Shion said, almost breathlessly.

            “And lots of windows in the kitchen and living room,” Nezumi added, looking not at the screen but the bones of Shion’s spine, the way they showed even through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. Nezumi lifted his hand, traced along them with the tips of his fingers, staring from the nape of Shion’s neck.

            “It’s available immediately,” Shion said.

            “Mmm hmm.”

            “But not that close to the university and bakery.”

            “But not far,” Nezumi said. “I looked it up, fifteen-minute commute by subway. You could walk it still, it’d just take close to an hour. But you’d be in shape.”

            “That means it’s, what, a half hour commute to the theater?”

            “Same as my current commute,” Nezumi said. He touched his face absently with the hand not tracing down Shion’s back, wondering if Misaki could cover the cuts on his skin with make-up. She probably could. The problem was his stamina, if he’d be able to do entire plays. Shion insisted overexerting himself while his ribs were still healing was _a stupid and pointless and idiotic thing to do._ But Nezumi doubted it’d be overexertion. It’d been a month. His ribs were basically completely healed. Kage had demanded Nezumi prove their condition with x-rays before he stepped back on stage, and Nezumi thought maybe he should set up an appointment to get those done by the end of the week.

            Shion straightened up just as Nezumi’s hand slid to his lower back and Nezumi’d been considering slipping it under the band of Shion’s briefs. “Well, it’s nice, but we can’t get our hopes up. With a price like that in the middle of Tokyo, other people will want this place as much as we do. And they’ll probably vamp screen us.”

            Nezumi had forgotten the vamp screen and wondered how he could have. Nobody had gotten jobs, apartments, houses, driver’s licenses, marriage licenses, anything without vamp screens since the Great Slaughter.

            “How did you get your current apartment?”

            “It’s in Safu’s name,” Shion said.

            “We’ll put this one in my name,” Nezumi replied, reaching out to shift the laptop back to his own lap, looking for the tab with information on leasing applications.

            “But I want it to be ours. Both of ours.”

            Nezumi found the tab, clicked it. “It will be, it’ll just be in my name.”

            “I can trick level one screenings, I did for my university position.”

            “I’m sure screening levels have gone up since the whole Tokyo vamp ordeal. It doesn’t matter what it says on paper. You can’t be stupid.”

            Shion crossed his arms. “I’m not stupid. I’ve been surviving as a vamp for a long time before you came around, you know, I’m well aware of what risks I can and cannot take.”

            “Why are you bothering taking risks at all?” Nezumi asked back.

            “Signing a lease shouldn’t be a risk, it’s my right to do so. I warned you, this is what it’s like being with a vamp, Nezumi, there’s always a risk – ”

            Nezumi held up a hand before Shion could get started. “We’re not having this discussion again. I know there’s risks, and I’m fully on board with dealing with them when they come up, but sometimes those risks are unnecessary, and this is one of those times. I know you want some grand symbolic gesture of a co-signed lease, but it’s not worth it. Try to be reasonable for once.”

            Shion exhaled loudly. “Well, good luck getting approved for an apartment as nice as this. Your last one is trashed, and they ask for previous landlord references, I’m sure.”

            “I’ll fix up my apartment before my landlord takes it over.”

            “You need to prove your employment. You’re not currently working.”

            “I’m still employed at the theater, Shion. Stop being so petty, you want this apartment too, and you know better than to put yourself through a screening that’s not necessary.”

            “Petty? I’m not being petty,” Shion objected.

            Nezumi bookmarked the page on his laptop before closing it. “I’ll apply tomorrow, let’s go to bed. It’s late, and you have a morning class.”

            “I know I have a morning class! I was already asleep, and you woke me up to look at this!”

            “Shh, don’t be so loud, it’s after midnight, you’ll wake your mother,” Nezumi said, placing the laptop on the nightstand, scooching down on the mattress, and pulling Shion down beside him.

            Shion fought him for a second, then let Nezumi pull him into his chest.

            “You’re so annoying,” he mumbled, turning around so he faced Nezumi and slipping his hand up Nezumi’s shirt.

            “What about your morning class?” Nezumi asked, but his own fingers were already feeling along the waistband of Shion’s briefs.

            “What about it?” Shion asked back, and he didn’t give Nezumi a chance to answer, leaning forward and kissing Nezumi’s neck.

            Nezumi let Shion push him onto his back and roll on top of him. He held up his arms so Shion could peel off his shirt, and Shion’s gaze only rested a second on _VAMP LOVER_ carved into Nezumi’s chest before he was reaching down to peel off Nezumi’s boxers.

            They were moving on. Nezumi was certain that soon enough, Shion wouldn’t pause at all at the words on his chest, and Nezumi’s own nightmares would disappear completely.

*

It was the day before Halloween and two days before they moved into their new apartment, and Shion and Nezumi both sat in green-cushioned chairs in a dimly lit room, watching the doctor Kage had sent Nezumi to affix his x-rays onto a backlit screen.

            “Perfect,” the doctor said, pointing at Nezumi’s bones. “See that? Very structurally sound.”

            It’d been the same thing the landlord had said about their new apartment when they’d toured it. _This building is very structurally sound._

            “How long did you say it’s been since these cracked?” the doctor asked, picking up his chart.

            “Five and a half weeks,” Shion answered, glancing at Nezumi, who gave him an amused half-grin.

            “I’m structurally sound,” he whispered, while the doctor started saying something else.

            “Shh, listen to what the doctor is saying,” Shion whispered back, and Nezumi’s grin grew.

            Shion meant to turn his attention back to the doctor, knowing Nezumi wasn’t going to listen, but he was distracted by the realization that, in the dim light of the x-ray showcasing room, he couldn’t even make out the lines on the pale skin of Nezumi’s face that marked where he’d been cut. His scabs had healed, and slowly the lines where the split skin had melded back together had faded, but now they looked vanished completely.

            Like Nezumi was whole. Perfect, structurally sound ribs, and no scars on his face. He was bruise-free, and though Shion knew the scars on his chest were still visible and likely would not ever fade the way the shallower cuts on his face had, he could not see those scars now, as they were covered by Nezumi’s shirt.

            “How does that sound?” the doctor asked, jarring Shion from his assessment of Nezumi’s face.

            “Great. Thanks, doc,” Nezumi said, standing up, shaking the doctor’s hand. 

            Shion stood up quickly, shaking the doctor’s hand as well, and then the man was leaving, and Nezumi and Shion were left alone with Nezumi’s x-rays.

            “Where did he go?” Shion asked.

            “Did you space out?” Nezumi asked back, jerking the x-ray down from the board to free it and slipping it into a large manila envelope Shion hadn’t even noticed on the counter against the wall. “It’s Tuesday, so you don’t have any more classes tonight, right? Want to come with me? I’m dropping this at the theater so I can let Kage know I’ll be back at work tomorrow. Then we can go out to eat, celebrate my structurally sound ribs, what do you think?”

            Shion still felt dazed, unfocused, watching Nezumi chatter happily to him. Nearly six weeks before, Shion had looked at this man and been certain he was dead. Now, Nezumi looked so alive, so happy, Shion could barely stop himself from reaching out, touching every bit of him, making sure he was really there, making sure any of this was really happening.

            He hadn’t answered when Nezumi reached out, caught the hem of Shion’s sweater and tugged on it so that Shion had no choice but to stumble against his chest.

            “Hey, what’s going on in that head, professor?” Nezumi asked, letting go of Shion’s sweater, tilting Shion’s chin up now, peering at him closely.

            With the man so close and the light from the screen that had lit up the x-ray sheet shining on Nezumi’s face, Shion could find the small lines on his face that marked his scars. But even though he could see them now, he knew that soon, he would not be able to. Soon, they’d be gone.

            “Your scars are almost completely faded,” he said, reaching up to trace one of them, the long one that ran along Nezumi’s jaw.

            “You certainly don’t look happy about it. Were you into the rugged look?” Nezumi asked, smiling again, and Shion let his fingers fall onto Nezumi’s lips next.

            Nezumi’s lips were wet, like he’d just licked them.

            “If it turns you on, I’ll let you beat me up a little,” Nezumi said quietly, his smile growing. He exhaled into it a breath of a laugh as he leaned forward.

            Shion dropped his fingers from Nezumi’s lips to let Nezumi kiss him. It was a small kiss, open-mouthed but too brief, and Shion tried to pull Nezumi back when he leaned away, realized that his hand had traveled up to the back of Nezumi’s neck without his notice.

            “You want to fuck in here?” Nezumi asked, sounding a little startled but at the same time looking around the room as if considering it.

            “I just want you to kiss me again,” Shion said, and Nezumi glanced at him again.

            He looked at Shion carefully for several seconds with that silent scrutiny of his, then leaned forward, kissed Shion so softly Shion thought his knees would give out and felt incredibly stupid for thinking it.

            “Again?” Nezumi asked, when he leaned away once more.

            Shion swallowed. “I think I’m good for now.”

            Nezumi gave him another lingering look, then smiled again, tilted his head toward the door. “Let’s get out of here?”

            Shion nodded, followed Nezumi out the x-ray showcasing room and to the front desk where Nezumi confirmed the theater was footing the bill, and then outside onto the street, where Nezumi led him to the subway station.

            In the train, Shion leaned against Nezumi, who slipped his finger around one of Shion’s belt loops and with his other hand held the hanging strap to steady them, as the train carriage rocked and twisted around the familiar curves of the city’s underground.

*

Karan loved Halloween, apparently, and Nezumi was glad for her holiday cheer, as he loved all of her pumpkin-flavored baked goods. It was his first day back at the theater, though, so he spent most of the day in rehearsal, and it was only two hours before the bakery closed that rehearsal ended.

            Nezumi wasn’t there for most of the day, but Karan had so many Halloween specials that both Safu and Shion had been recruited to help. Shion had even cancelled his Wednesday night course, which he claimed his students were thrilled about. According to Shion, college students loved Halloween, almost as much as Karan did.

            When Nezumi finally left the theater, trick-or-treaters were out dressed in costume, along with older teens and even adults going to parties. Nezumi had never done Halloween, and though he had noticed before the most popular costume, he’d never given it much thought.

            Nezumi stood at the back exit of the theater and watched a hoard of vamps walk by, forgetting on sight of them his rush to get to the bakery. They weren’t real vamps, obviously, their white wigs a little askew, their scars clearly the result of make-up.

            “Scary, huh,” Shunsuke said, elbowing Nezumi in the ribs, and he flinched away reflexively, rubbed his side warily, but there was no pain.

            He glanced at Shunsuke, who smiled lightly at him. His eyes were red, and Nezumi could see the edges of his contact lenses.

            “I guess it’s pointless to ask if you’re going to make-up Misaki’s Halloween party tonight, seeing as you rushed out the theater the moment rehearsal ended.”

            Nezumi said nothing. The red eyes were distracting him. The contacts were good quality. Shunsuke’s eyes really looked like the eyes of a vamp.

            “Are they freaking you out?” Shunsuke asked suddenly, pointing at his eyes, which had widened. He cursed quietly, closed them. “I wasn’t thinking. I was even going to ask if you wanted a pair, Ichika brought in a whole box of them. Misaki’s doing our vamp make-up inside before we head to her place. She even has temporary hair dye. I didn’t think about your past, I don’t think any of us did. That’s shitty of us, isn’t it?”

            Shunsuke kept his eyes closed. He leaned back against the brick wall of the theater, slid his hands in his pockets.

            “It doesn’t bother me.”

            “You probably don’t want to go to a party with a bunch of people dressed like vamps.”

            “I wasn’t planning to go anyway.”

            Shunsuke smiled again, but it was a weak sort of smile. “I’m still sorry. I feel like an idiot, coming out here to ask you if you wanted to dress like a vamp.”

            “It doesn’t matter to me. And you can open your eyes,” Nezumi said, glancing at a giggling group of teenage girls who walked by the theater. Only one of them was dressed as a vamp. The others were an assortment of cats and superheroes and maids.

            When he looked back at Shunsuke, the man was squinting.

            Nezumi stopped himself from rolling his own eyes. “Stop squinting.”

            Shunsuke opened his eyes slowly. “So you have other plans then?”

            “Yeah, I should get going.”

            “Well, look, I’m glad you’re back and recovered from all your mysterious injuries. It’s good to have you here again, this place isn’t the same without you.”

            Nezumi looked across the street. Some kid with a cape was running down the sidewalk, his cape flying behind him, rippling so Nezumi wasn’t able to make out the logo plastered on it. “Thanks.”

            “The manager said your boyfriend came by with you when you dropped off your x-rays yesterday,” Shunsuke added lightly.

            Nezumi glanced at him. “Since when did the manager share the cast’s tedious habit for gossip?”

            “Since Misaki grilled him for every detail when he told us you’d be coming back last night.”

            Nezumi shook his head. “Ridiculous.”

            “I notice you didn’t deny the boyfriend label. So it’s true? You should introduce him to us one day, I’d love to properly meet this guy who’s somehow figured out the secret to winning your heart,” Shunsuke said, laughing and nudging Nezumi’s shoulder with his own, his red eyes crinkling.

            Nezumi watched him silently, and Shunsuke quickly stopped laughing.

            “Okay, okay, I’m done getting on your nerves, you’re free to go now to whatever is more exciting than our little Halloween party. See you tomorrow.”

            Nezumi gave himself another moment to take in how strange Shunsuke looked with red eyes, then nodded at him, stepped away. “See you.”

            In the subway train, there were more vamp-costumed people with red eyes and white wigs and painted scars. Some costumes were more convincing than others. There were two people who were so convincing Nezumi wondered if they could be real vamps who hadn’t bothered to put on their human disguises, knowing today they could blend in, today they could take a break from hiding.

            At first, Nezumi felt on edge being surrounded by fake vamps, but he quickly got used to it. He was even a little amused until he really thought about the whole thing and felt sudden disgust that these people who wanted vamps dead would dress up like them for their own entertainment.

            Once he got to the bakery, Nezumi was mostly annoyed. The bakery itself was filled with vamps, and Nezumi wondered what Karan thought of this, but when he looked at her behind the counter talking to a customer, she was laughing and seemed cheerful and warm as she always was.

            Nezumi stopped behind the counter to let her kiss him on the cheek and give him a list of baked goods they were low on up front before he headed back to the kitchen, the door swinging open just as he got to it.

            “Oh, good, you’re here, we’re low on cupcakes, can you help Shion with that? I want to help Karan up front, she’s swamped,” Safu said quickly, balancing trays of scones and muffins in her hands.

            “Need help bringing that up?”

            “No, go help Shion,” Safu said, calling behind her shoulder now as she had already walked away.

            Nezumi let himself into the kitchen, found Shion with icing smeared on his cheek where his scar would have shown if he hadn’t covered it with foundation.

            “Hi! How was your first day back at school?” Shion asked, grinning that stupid grin of his as Nezumi went to the sink to wash his hands.

            “Good. There’s vamps all over.”

            Shion’s eyebrows creased. “At rehearsal?”

            “Everywhere.”

            “Oh, for Halloween, you mean. Yeah, it’s always like that. You never noticed?”

            “I did notice, but it seems like there’s more this year,” Nezumi said, drying his hands with the towel Shion offered him.

            Shion shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, I’ve been in the kitchen all day. Maybe there is, there’s been a lot of vamp excitement this year, with Discreet Meat being discovered and your blood heist and the fire at the JBVIC and the news of the Tokyo vamp’s death.”

            Nezumi pulled the front of Shion’s apron before the man could step away from him, kissed him briefly before letting go. “You don’t have to bother with your human disguise today, you know.”

            “The real thing is very different from the costumes,” Shion said, smiling slightly.

            “There were some pretty convincing costumes out there.”

            “What was that you said a few weeks ago about unnecessary risk?” Shion asked back, handing Nezumi his apron – Nezumi finally had one of his own, a late birthday present from Safu. It was one of those aprons that had a picture of a naked torso on it to make it look like the wearer of the apron was actually shirtless. The one Safu had chosen for him had the naked torso of a woman in a yellow bikini, which she and Shion seemed to find absurdly hilarious. Nezumi wore it despite the stupidity of it because Shion laughed every time he looked at it in a way that crinkled his eyes and had him grinning as he baked even minutes after he’d stopped laughing. “Come help me, you’re faster at icing, and I need to get another batch of cupcakes going.”

            Nezumi pulled on the apron, letting Shion laugh at him as he stood beside the man and pulled a tray of finished cupcakes towards him.

            “Mom wants festive designs on them, like ghosts and jack-o’-lanterns,” Shion said, after he’d stopped laughing, while Nezumi took in the array of icing bags and pipers in front of him.

            “And vamps?” Nezumi offered.

            Shion smiled. “If you can make one of us out of icing. We’re a complicated creature to replicate.”

            Nezumi laughed and got to work, not bothering to replicate Shion’s features in icing, but going off the stereotyped vamp image – the hook nose, the widow’s peak, the narrowed red eyes, the fangs that he added little drops of red icing blood to the ends of.

            “I think it looks exactly like you,” Nezumi said, showing the finished cupcake to Shion.

            Shion looked up from the batter he was mixing, laughed again in a loud and abrupt way that made Nezumi want to drag him out of the kitchen and up to his childhood bedroom and fuck him senseless, or maybe just hold him so close it felt as if they had the same skin and could never be apart again.

            “Very handsome,” Shion said.

            “More handsome than you.”

            “Careful what you say, or you’ll be moving in with that cupcake instead of me tomorrow. Did you talk to the landlord about the keys?”

            “She can meet at nine tomorrow morning, I told her that was fine and already told Kage I had to come in late. He threw a fit of course but only threatened to fire me twice, which is how he gives permission.”

            “I have class!” Shion objected.

            “You have to be there to get the key? Don’t think I’m going to start moving our stuff in without you, I’ll just get the key and head to rehearsal, you can come by the theater to get your copy if you want to start moving our stuff without me. You’ll be doing all the heavy lifting, I’ll tell you that from now, you’re the one with the vamp strength.”

            “You know I can’t use my vamp strength at will.”

            Nezumi started on a jack-o’-lantern cupcake, debating whether to make the face happy or angry. “I’ll drop a box on my foot so you get pissed at it for hurting me and activate your crazy vamp hormones.”

            Shion shook his head, biting his lip as if trying to hide his grin, though the effort didn’t work. “You really think you’re funny, don’t you?”

            “I am funny,” Nezumi corrected, deciding on a happy jack-o’-lantern, and pulling up an image of one on his phone so he could make sure to get the toothy grin right.

            Safu announced her reappearance in the kitchen with a laugh as she walked through the swinging door. “I really love that apron, it’s too good. Wait, where are all the cupcakes? Have you only done one?”

            “One and a half,” Nezumi said, pointing at the cupcake he’d covered in an orange icing base.

            “What have you two been doing, we’re low on almost everything up front!” Safu chastised, picking up the vamp cupcake and inspecting it.

            “I focus on quality, not quantity,” Nezumi said.

            “This is quality?” Safu asked, turning the cupcake to face him.

            “Hey now, that’s a great vamp.”

            Safu sighed and placed it back down. “It’s cute. It certainly should not have taken you a whole ten minutes. Stop distracting him,” Safu said, turning her glare onto Shion now.

            “This is on me?”

            “I don’t trust you not to make out with him when you two are left alone, you’re like a teenager.”

            “We didn’t!” Shion objected.

            “He is horny,” Nezumi pitched in, resting his elbow on Shion’s shoulder until Shion pushed him off. “Won’t take his hands off me. I’ve been trying to focus on baking, but there’s no stopping him.” Nezumi put his arm back on Shion’s shoulder, and again Shion pushed him off.

            “You’re both idiots,” Safu pointed out, then pulled the cupcake tray towards her. “I’ll do ghosts, you do jack-o’-lanterns, let’s get these up front.”

            “No more vamps?”

            “Don’t you find it disturbing that on Halloween everyone suddenly loves vamps?” Safu asked, crinkling her nose.

            “Halloween is about monsters that scare people. People don’t love vamps, they’re scared of them,” Shion corrected.

            “I still don’t like it,” Safu said.

            They were quiet then, focusing on baking. Shion soon had the new batch of cupcakes in the oven and started helping to ice, and after ten more minutes, they’d finished icing every cupcake but one.

            Nezumi was counting the finished cupcakes to see whether the last one should be a ghost or a jack-o’-lantern when he abruptly lost count on hearing the sound of giggling from the front of the bakery, loud enough to trickle all the way back to the kitchen.

            It was a familiar giggling. A giggling Nezumi heard every night still, when his nightmares took him back into that room, onto that concrete floor, arms and legs pinned and Momoe’s fingers trickling up the skin of his torso to his chest.

            It was the giggling of a child, and Nezumi tried to reason with himself – there were many children in the bakery, there were Halloween specials and children loved sweets and the sugar rushes would make them laugh, giggle just like that, loud so that it reached the kitchen.

            Just because it sounded like Momoe didn’t mean that it was.

            The giggling stopped and Nezumi heard Shion saying his name in a way that sounded more like an echo than a sound, and then the giggling was back, and Nezumi’s knees almost gave out. He clutched the edge of the island counter and told himself that he was wrong, it was just a child, he was awake and that meant Momoe wasn’t anywhere near him; he was in the bakery and Shion was beside him, and that had to mean he was safe.

*


	27. Chapter 27

“What’s going on?” Shion asked, leaning closer to Nezumi, touching Nezumi’s arm, wanting the man to look at him, but Nezumi’s head was turned, he was looking at the wall of the kitchen with such a focus it was as if he was trying to see through it.

            Nezumi’s entire body was stiff. His jaw was clenched, and eyes were wide, and Shion had seen Nezumi scared before, knew exactly what it looked like, and this was it.

            Shion let go of Nezumi to walk around him, stand between him and the kitchen wall he stared at.

            “Nezumi, look at me,” Shion said, and Nezumi did only after a moment, his wide eyes slipping all over Shion’s face as if wasn’t seeing Shion at all, as if he was searching for someone else.

            There was a girlish giggling coming from the front of the bakery, and it occurred to Shion that the front room was on the other side of the wall Nezumi stared at, that maybe this was what Nezumi was trying to see.

            Shion reached up, cupped Nezumi’s face and tried to make the man look at him properly. “Hey, tell me what’s happening.” Shion’s voice came out harsher than he’d intended. He realized that to see Nezumi scared was making him scared too, was making his skin hot, was making him feel wiry and strange, was making him angry.

            He tried to calm down, but this was especially hard to do when Nezumi finally seemed to focus on him.

            “I thought I heard…”

            Nezumi shook his head. The look he gave Shion was an almost desperate one, and Shion recognized the heat under his own skin, recognized the way his body felt like it was changing, something bubbling inside of him, something dangerous and deadly.

            “Shion…” Safu said slowly, as if from a great distance. Shion paid her no attention. He focused only on Nezumi.

            “You thought you heard what?” Shion asked, sternly.

            Nezumi’s fingers unlatched from the kitchen counter. They were shaking when he ran them through his bangs. He shook his head again.

            “Nothing. No one. I’m fine,” he whispered. He inhaled deeply, and Shion watched the rise of his chest.

            There was another peal of giggling, and Nezumi’s head snapped like a dog’s might to a squirrel, and it should have been comical but it was not.

            He stared back at the wall of the kitchen behind Shion, so Shion turned, stared at it too, listened to the giggling that seemed to seep through it. It was just a child’s giggle, nothing remarkable.

            He looked back at Nezumi, who seemed paler than before, his fingers tight around his bangs so that Shion almost worried he’d yank them all out.

            It was the giggling that scared Nezumi, this was evident now. Shion couldn’t make sense of it, but Nezumi was not someone to be scared without good reason.

            Shion turned to Safu. “Stay here,” he told her.

            “What’s going on? You don’t look yourself,” Safu said quickly, while Shion looked back at Nezumi.

            “Nezumi, I’ll be right back, okay?” he said, though Nezumi didn’t seem to hear him.

            “What’s going on, Shion?” Safu asked again, this time louder.

            “Just stay here and make sure Nezumi stays here too,” Shion said, walking past her and freeing his arm from her grasp when she reached out for him.

            “Nezumi, what’s wrong?” Shion heard Safu ask, just as he left the kitchen. He walked down the hall to the front room, opened the door and was immediately surrounded by vamps.

            It was a moment before he remembered it was Halloween. People always dressed like vamps on Halloween, but Nezumi had been right. There were more this year, and the costumes were better. Some were eerily convincing, reminded Shion of himself in the mirror when he wiped off his make-up and took off his contacts.

            Of course, he hadn’t seen his own white hair in decades. He was more used to himself with dark hair than white, and to see vamps with white hair was a strange thing, seemed almost unnatural, like an untrue stereotype rather than an accurate portrayal.

            Another peal of giggling reminded Shion why he was out here. The bakery was packed, the line to the counter swinging around the entire shop and curling right in front of the door to the back that Shion was trying to come out through, so Shion had to weave around a group of fake vamps who were waiting in line in order to see the source of the giggling standing near the front of the line.

            He recognized Momoe immediately. It would have been impossible not to. She was in Vamp Hunter uniform, a skintight long-sleeved black shirt and black cargo pants that seemed too loose on her thin waist, were held up by suspenders. Along with vamps, Vamp Hunters were another occasional costume choice on Halloween, though not nearly as common. Momoe could have been a child in a costume, she had the features and the laugh and the voice of a little girl, and maybe that was why no one was reacting to a Vamp Hunter being in the middle of a bakery.

            Around the girl were several larger people, muscular and tall and powerful-looking, and Shion assumed they were Vamp Hunters even though they were not in Vamp Hunter uniform. They were in costume. One dressed as a surgeon, the other as a fireman, the other as a soldier, the fourth as a police officer.

            “Look at that one!” Momoe was saying, giggling again and pulling the fireman’s sleeve and pointing to a little boy whose vamp wig had fallen down to his eyes so that it looked like he had white hair sprouting out his forehead.

            The Vamp Hunter dressed as a fireman did not look to where Momoe was gleefully pointing. He was scanning the bakery, and Shion stepped back, let himself slip into a cluster of teenage vamps waiting in line.

            “Hey, we’re in line here, you have to go to the end, you know,” said one of the teenagers.

            Shion looked at the teenager because looking at Momoe had Shion’s hands shaking, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he lost it, before the heat under the surface of his skin became too much and his vamp strength won over.

            The bakery was crowded. He couldn’t see any Vamp Hunter guns, but the Vamp Hunter dressed as a police officer and the Vamp Hunter dressed as a soldier both had normal guns clipped to their belt loops. Shion didn’t know what would happen if he attacked them. He knew he would kill Momoe. He also knew he would lose himself. He might do anything. He might hurt anyone, and the Vamp Hunters might hurt anyone back trying to get to him.

            The teenager glaring at Shion had spots painted over his face in bright red paint. Shion made himself focus on this, the way the color was wrong, it was not the pale pinkish red of a real vamp’s scar, it was sloppy and inaccurate.

            “What are you staring at?”

            “Nothing,” Shion murmured. The teenager was loud, and Shion didn’t want draw attention to himself. He heard Momoe laugh again and felt his heart beat faster.

            Shion stepped away from the teenage vamps, slipped along the line as if he was trying to find the end of it. He tried to breathe evenly.

            “Professor Shion?”

            Shion had made it to the end of the line. In front of him were two of his students, both dressed like either mice or rabbits, Shion couldn’t be sure. The grey fluffy ears sticking up from their headbands were both long enough and round enough that it could have gone either way.

            “Mari, Rio, hi,” Shion said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. His students glanced at each other, then smiled at him almost warily.

            “We heard they have the best pumpkin muffins here,” Mari said, linking her arm with Rio’s.

            Shion nodded vaguely. In his ears was Momoe’s laugh. “Yes, that’s true,” Shion heard himself say. When he breathed he could no longer smell the strong pumpkin-cinnamon-nutmeg scent that lingered in the bakery all of October. He smelled instead something earthy and familiar. He smelled instead Nezumi’s blood, and when Shion blinked, all he saw was Nezumi dead on a concrete floor.

            “Professor, are you all right?”

            Shion shut his eyes tightly, then opened them again, saw Rio and Mari in front of him, leaning back from him and staring at him with wide eyes.

            “Excuse me,” he managed, backing away from them, bumping into the back of someone’s chair and hardly noticing, as he found himself looking at Momoe again. She sat at a corner table across the bakery with the other Vamp Hunters now. She had a cupcake in her hands, iced like a jack-o’-lantern. The other Vamp Hunters didn’t have anything.

            Shion couldn’t do anything to Momoe now. His students were here. If he killed her he’d be discovered as a vamp, not just to the JBVIC and the government who already knew who he was, but to the general public – to his students, who would drop his class; to his university, who would fire him; to his mother’s customers, who would never come to the bakery again.

            If he killed her, also, there could be gunfire in the bakery from the Vamp Hunters dressed as a police officer and a soldier – there was no way those guns on their belts were fake, just part of their costumes. Other people could get hurt, his own mother was just behind the counter, what if she got hurt –

            Shion made it to the exit of the bakery and stumbled out of it just as another vamp opened the door to come in.

            “Oh, wow, look how crowded it is, you want to wait in that line?” the vamp holding the door said, looking back to his friend.

            “It’s a tradition! We come here Halloween every year, it’s your fault for taking so long to do your scar. If we’d gotten here earlier we’d already be digging into that pie,” a second vamp said, appearing behind the first.

            Shion tried to listen to them, to concentrate on them, to look at them and evaluate the accuracy of their costumes and thank them for opening the door for him, but he couldn’t speak and he couldn’t see anything but Nezumi on the floor, on his back with his arms and legs spread, blood covering his entire torso and blood on his arms and blood on his face and blood in his hair.

            The October night air was cool, and Shion tried to feel relief from it. Outside the bakery he didn’t stray far from it, made it to the curb and sat down and dug his fingers into the edge of the sidewalk to keep himself from getting back up, running back into the bakery, grabbing Momoe mid-giggle and shoving his fist right into her mouth to silence her, all the way down her throat, lower until he reached her intestines and his entire arm was inside of her, and he’d grab her intestines and rip them right back out her mouth again, then go right back in for each of her lungs, right back in for her liver, right back in for her stomach, right back in for every other organ until all that was left was her heart, and that he’d leave to beat weakly, to keep her alive long enough to feel the pain that Nezumi had, that Nezumi still did every night.

            Shion tried to dig his nails harder into the sidewalk curb to ground himself, realized his fists were not around anything and looked down. The curb had two deep gashes along the side of it where his hands had been clutching, and Shion realized he’d crumbled the cement in his fists.

            Shion lifted his hands up. The dust that was left from the cement coated his palms, a pale ash. He could turn Momoe’s bones into this same ash, just as fine, even finer. He could destroy her – who cared what happened to anyone else in that bakery? What did that matter?

            Shion was standing before he realized it. He was back inside the bakery and didn’t remember walking from the curb to the entrance. He heard so many voices but none of them mattered so he tuned them all out, and somehow, everything went silent but Momoe’s voice. Maybe that was a vamp thing. Zeroing in on someone’s voice, on just one sound, just a single particular pitch. Maybe this was some sort of evolutionary advantage of vamps, a way to hunt Shion had never uncovered before because he’d never had any desire to hunt, but now he did.

            Now he had a target, and it was Momoe. He heard her clearly even though he could not see her, as the line of costumers had doubled around in the short time he’d been gone and now wove in front of the table in the left front corner of the bakery, where Shion knew Momoe sat even though he could not see her.

            Shion made his way to her slowly. He was not in a rush.

            Her childish voice came to him clearly. “This cupcake is so amazing, oh, wow, Tetsu, you have to get me another, will you, please? Cut in front of the line, I can’t even wait another minute! Get me a ghost one this time, those are so cute, I can’t stand it!”

            There was silence then, and then Momoe’s voice again, like she was replying to something Shion hadn’t heard.

            Shion hadn’t known this was something he was able to do, block out every sound but one person’s voice. He might have been amazed by this, but he didn’t care at all.

            There was a family with four kids in line, and Shion had to get through them to get to Momoe’s table. The kids seemed to be wearing colored cardboard boxes, holes at the tops where their heads stuck through, holes at the sides for their arms. Shion had no idea what they were supposed to be. He was distracted from trying to figure out a way to squeeze by their boxed bodies because of what Momoe said next.

            “Yes, I know this is the right bakery, you think I’d make a mistake? That woman who sold us this cupcake is his mother. Hmm, if you kill her, he’ll probably come out of hiding, don’t you think? Oh, fantastic, new plan! Kill the nice baker lady! But first, get me another cupcake, and only after she gives it to you, then you kill her. You won’t even have to pay for the cupcake, what a nice perk, don’t you think? Make sure no blood gets on the cupcake though, okay? Can I trust you not to screw up, Tetsu? Can I trust you to kill this woman and bring me my fucking cupcake without a problem, or do I have to go up there myself?”

            Shion stopped trying to get through the boxes. Voices flooded back that weren’t Momoe’s, the sounds of the bakery too, all coming back at once so that it seemed deafening for the first few seconds before he got used to it again, and then it just seemed normal, and Shion wondered if he’d only imagined being unable to hear anything but Momoe’s voice for those few moments.

            The father of the boxed children was talking to him, Shion realized.

            “Are we in your way? So sorry, this has been happening all day. Hana, honey, I told you to wait with the kids outside.”

           “They wanted to come in,” the woman beside him said, then looked at Shion and smiled. “They’re a Rubix cube, isn’t that just so cute?”

           Her smile faded the longer she looked at Shion. He didn’t know what he looked like. He didn’t bother replying, turned away from her and stopped trying to get through the blockade of her Rubix-cube children to get to Momoe.

           There wasn’t time to get to Momoe. He had to get his mother away from the counter.

           Now, Shion was in a rush. He weaved around tables and through costumed people and didn’t apologize to anyone, and then he was in front of the line, in front of the next counter, looking at his mother and ignoring the objections of the customers in line behind him.

           “What’s wrong?” she asked immediately.

           “Go to the kitchen right now, get Safu and Nezumi and leave out the back. Go to Safu’s.”

           “Honey, what’s going on?” Karan asked quickly.

           Behind him Shion heard more objections, not to him now but to someone else who was cutting in line, and Shion didn’t turn around, didn’t want to see if it was Momoe or one of the other Vamp Hunters, didn’t want to lose control of himself right now because he had to get his mother to safety first.

           “Now, Mom!”

           Karan didn’t hesitate this time, ran along the back of the counter and through the door to the back.

           Shion turned around. Pushing his way to the front of the line was the Vamp Hunter dressed as a police officer. He wasn’t looking at Shion, but at some little boy who was poking the gun on his belt, and Shion could just make out the boy’s voice.

           “That’s not real, is it? That looks real, but it’s not, is it? Hey, mister, is it real?”

           “Son, keep your hands to yourself,” the boy’s father said, pulling the kid’s arm back.

           Shion stopped looking at them. He cleared his throat and tried to speak over everything. “Everyone, if I can have your attention! There’s a fire in the kitchens, and everyone needs to evacuate immediately! Fire! There’s a fire!” Shion shouted, knowing he was drawing attention to himself, knowing the Vamp Hunters and Momoe would recognize him, but that was fine. He could deal with them if no one else was around. He could kill them easily, he could give himself over to the full power of his vamp strength the moment everyone who was innocent was evacuated from the bakery and safely away from him.

           The result of shouting _Fire!_ in a crowded bakery was chaos. There were more shouts repeating what Shion had said, there were shouts of people’s names, families and friends trying to find each other, there was the sound of the legs of chairs screeching hard against the floor as people got up quickly, tried to get to the exit.

           Shion tried to watch everyone, to make sure no one got trampled, that the Rubix cube children didn’t fall with those big cumbersome boxes on them, that everyone got out safely. But everything that was right in front of him, the sights and the sounds, all faded the moment he heard Momoe’s voice up close.

            “Oh, how nice of you, you certainly made finding you easy! I really must thank you for that,” she said happily, in front of him suddenly, one hand holding half a cupcake and the other pointing the gun from either the police officer or the soldier at him.

            But even she didn’t seem clear, seemed to be fading, blurring at the edges, and soon Shion couldn’t see her at all.

            What he saw instead was Nezumi lying on the floor. There was blood all over and seeping out the words carved into Nezumi’s chest and puddles of it on the floor like rainwater after a storm.

            And Nezumi was dead.

            Shion didn’t know if everyone had evacuated from the bakery as yet. He was no longer in the bakery at all. He was in the JBVIC, and everyone around him was guilty of hurting Nezumi, everyone around him had taken Nezumi away from him, everyone around him deserved to die, and Shion would rip them all apart until it was all of their blood that covered the floor and the walls and the ceiling and his own hands so thickly he could practically taste it.

*

The October night was brisk, and a quick wind swept Nezumi’s hair over his cheeks, over his eyes, into the part of his lips.

            It would blow him away, whisk him up into the night sky and somewhere far, like Kyoto, maybe, where he hadn’t been in decades. He was weightless, felt empty of anything but cool air and knew he was no match to this wind, a strong wind that shook his shoulders now, that gripped his arms firmly.

            “Nezumi. Nezumi, honey, can you hear me? Wake up, sweetheart.”

            While his body was empty, in his head were Momoe’s words. She knew a lot of things about him. She knew the names of his mom and dad, and Nezumi didn’t know how she knew this. He wasn’t even sure that he had known this, but he must have, surely, seven years old was old enough to know that _Mommy_ and _Daddy_ were not real names – wasn’t it?

            Maybe not. Regardless, Momoe had known. She’d told him, and she’d hit him with the butt of the Vamp Hunter gun, a gun solid as cement. She’d known more than their names, and she’d told him that too.

            His mother liked to sing. His father had a sharp, loud, abrupt laugh like a bark. His mother wore her hair in a braid down her back. His father was the one who braided her hair, every morning, was the one who taught Nezumi how to do so.

            Maybe Momoe hadn’t known these things. Maybe these were just Nezumi’s memories, just things he’d remembered when he was in that room and Momoe was saying things to him, and everything he had never wanted to think about again came back. He didn’t know why he had never wanted to think about these things because these were his memories, these were all he had left, why had he let himself forget them?

            He stood on his mother’s feet, and she taught him to dance. His dad wore glasses when he read and lifted them to rest on the top of his head when he wasn’t reading. One time his sister spilled sauce all over his favorite shirt and cried when he snapped at her. At night he slipped into his parents’ bed because he was scared there were monsters under his own. There was a cat that slept outside the house but sometimes sniffed Nezumi’s fingers if he crouched in the grass and held very still with his arm outstretched and his palm up. He liked to explore the woods that surrounded the house in the very early mornings when no one else was awake. On his sixth birthday, his father gave him a compass so if he got lost exploring, he could always find his way back home.

            _No matter how far you are, you’ll still be able to find us. But don’t go too far, or it’ll take you a long time to get back, and we’ll miss you too much._

            “Oh, honey… He’s crying. Is he having a nightmare?”

            “I don’t think so. To us it looks like he’s passed out, but I don’t think he’s fully unconscious. I think he’s actually in a psychotic state. It’s that Momoe girl. I didn’t tell Shion, but she’s come up in my research. She’s famous in the psychoanalytical world. She’s uses something called psychological warfare. I have a feeling what she did to Nezumi physically wasn’t the worst of what happened in Vamp Hunter headquarters.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “He didn’t show any signs of it, but we know Nezumi’s dealt with trauma before. He copes by building walls around it and separating it from his conscious thoughts. It comes out at night when he falls asleep and he can’t consciously stop himself from thinking about these things.”

            “What are you talking about, Safu? Psychological warfare? You knew about this Momoe girl?”

            “They talk about her at work, especially in the last few years. She trains other Vamp Hunters around the world. There’s debates about the ethics of it, torture of the mind rather than the body to get information. But nobody cares about ethics when it comes to vamps and vamp sympathizers.”

            “Let me get the door, can you steady him if I move my arm for a second?”

            The wind was off Nezumi’s face, which he didn’t understand. He’d just been playing tag with his sister, barefoot with the dew of the grass wicking up to wet his ankles, and the wind had been just the right amount of cool. But now the wind was gone, and he was inside, and it wasn’t his ankles that were wet, but his face.

            “He’ll be fine, Karan. This is Nezumi, he’s stronger than whatever that girl can do to him. And I’ve studied her, I’ve studied psychoanalysis all my life. Let’s just go inside my apartment, if I can talk to him I know I can bring him back.”

  
            “Bring him back? Where is he?”

            “I don’t know. He’s wherever Momoe took him. His past, probably. She would have wanted him to remember hating vamps, she would have wanted him to think about what vamps did to him, what they took form him. Most likely, in his mind he’s somewhere with his family right now. Possibly the night of the Great Slaughter, but psychologically, longing is just as powerful as fear. She could have taken him back to memories of when he had a family, when he was happy.”

            “But she’s not even here! Are you sure Shion can handle – ”

            “Karan, I wouldn’t have left him if I wasn’t positive he’d be all right on his own. We’ll only be a hindrance if we were there. You didn’t see Shion at the JBVIC. He changes, you said you saw it, that he wasn’t himself when he told you to get out of there, right? I think it must be a vamp thing, some instinct to survive and to protect the ones he loves, both a physical and psychological change. Momoe won’t be able to touch him, I’m certain of it. Okay, can you hold Nezumi while I get my key? Once we’re inside, let’s sit him on the couch.”

            After a few seconds, there were hands on Nezumi’s face, tucking his hair behind his ears, wiping at the wet on his cheeks. Nezumi looked and looked and tried to see anything, but it was too dark.

            “Nezumi. Can you hear me?”

            Nezumi didn’t recognize the voice, but it was cool and calming. He tried to speak, but no voice came to his lips, so he had to nod instead.

            He wondered if he was in a nightmare. Sometimes when he had nightmares, his voice was stolen from him.

            “Can you open your eyes?”

            Nezumi hadn’t known his eyes were closed. It explained the darkness. He tried to open them, but they seemed plastered shut. His eyes felt gluey. He wondered if his eyelids had been sealed, if he’d see only darkness his entire life now.

            “Nezumi, you’re hyperventilating. Are you scared? There’s no need to be scared, I’m your friend, I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t have to open your eyes, you can keep them closed, it’s even better that way. Just relax, breathe with me, can we do that? Can we inhale now?”

            Nezumi inhaled. He was relieved that he could do this.

            “Now exhale. Deep. Get everything out. Even when you think you’re empty, I want you to keep going.”

            He breathed out as deeply as he could. Emptied himself of everything just like he was told. Kept going until the stream of breath leaving his lips was thin and didn’t feel like air at all, and he gasped, then, eager to fill the parts of him that were hollow now.

            “Good, that’s good, you’ve gotten rid of all the bad things now, so let’s start breathing evenly, normal breaths. Inhale, two, three. Exhale, two, three. Inhale, two, three. Exhale, two, three…”

            Nezumi breathed normal breaths. He wasn’t sure how long he did this until he realized he no longer felt empty. He no longer felt like he might blow away with the wind that wasn’t even there anymore. He felt solid, but shaky still. Uncertain.

            “Try opening your eyes again,” the voice said gently, after some time.

            Nezumi opened his eyes. He was not seven years old. He was not running outside, barefoot in the wet grass, with his sister laughing behind him and trying to catch up to him.

            “Do you know who I am?”

            “Safu,” Nezumi whispered. He felt dizzy and feverish. He slumped forward, and Safu caught him by the upper arms, held him up. “What’s wrong with me?”

            “Nothing’s wrong with you. How do you feel?”

            Nezumi had closed his eyes and made himself open them again. He looked heavily at Safu, who watched him with concern.

             “I know you don’t want to talk, but I think it might help,” she said quietly. “Even though I’m in research, I have the certifications to be a practicing psychiatrist. I want you to talk to me a little bit. It doesn’t have to be right now. Maybe once a week. Can we do that?”

            Nezumi pressed his hands to his face. He was crying, and he didn’t know why. He was in Safu’s apartment, on Safu’s sofa, and couldn’t remember getting here.

            He took the tissues Safu held out for him, wiped his face and blew his nose.

            “Where’s Shion?” he asked, instead of answering Safu. He didn’t want to talk about anything, ever. He just wanted to feel less like shit, less like his body was about to crumble on him.

            “He’s at the bakery. What’s the last thing you remember?”

            Nezumi shook his head. “I don’t know.” He didn’t want to try remembering anything. He wished Shion were here. He leaned to the side, stuck his hand in his back pocket, but his phone wasn’t there.

            He tried his other back pocket. He was still wearing his apron and stared down at the woman’s torso in the yellow bikini, then looked back at Safu.

            “Can you call him?”

            “Oh, honey, you’re back,” Karan gushed, suddenly appearing with a glass of water that she placed on the end table before sitting next to Nezumi, cupping his face with her hands.

            “Back from where?” Nezumi asked, pulling her hands from his face. “Can you call Shion? I think I left my phone in the kitchen.”

            “Call Shion?” Karan asked, blinking at him.

            “He doesn’t remember, probably not anything from when he heard her voice earlier today,” Safu said quickly.

            Nezumi didn’t ask whose voice Safu was talking about. “Will you give me your phone?” he asked her, his voice harder this time, the tissues he still held balled in his fists.

            Safu looked like she would refuse, but then she slid her hand in her own pocket, extracted her phone and gave it to Nezumi after unlocking the screen.

            Nezumi went to Shion’s name. His fingers shook lightly as he scrolled. He felt like he might pass out. Safu’s picture that went along with Shion’s name was not one Nezumi had seen before. They were younger, and Safu was wearing a white graduation gown and one of those flat hats but didn’t seem old enough to be graduating college. Maybe this was from high school. Shion didn’t have a gown, was wearing just jeans and layered sweaters, but he’d been homeschooled. They had their arms around each other, were holding up peace signs with their fingers and grinning widely. Even in the picture, Nezumi could tell Shion was starving.

            Nezumi put the ringing phone to his ear. It kept ringing, and then there was Shion’s voice.

            _Hi! It’s Shion, I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll call right back. Thanks!_

            Nezumi didn’t leave a message. He took the phone from his ear and handed it back to Safu, who had her hand outstretched for it.

            “You knew he wouldn’t pick up.”

            “He’s busy.”

            “Doing what?” Nezumi demanded, but his voice came out just as quiet and breathy as before. He looked at Karan and realized it was strange she wasn’t at the bakery. From the time on Safu’s phone, he’d seen it was an hour until the bakery closed. It was Halloween. The bakery was packed, and they couldn’t afford to all be sitting in Safu’s living room, leaving Shion alone there to deal with customers and orders.

            “Why don’t you drink this, sweetheart,” Karan said, holding out the glass of water.

            Nezumi ignored the water. “Why aren’t you at the bakery?”

            Karan said nothing, so Nezumi turned back to Safu, who exhaled slowly.

            “Vamp Hunters came.”

            Nezumi stood up, and Safu and Karan both stood up with him. Karan hand her hand on his shoulder.

            “Honey, wait – ”

            Nezumi jerked away from her. “They came to the bakery? Where’s Shion?”

            “You need to relax,” Safu said, and Nezumi still felt dizzy but like hell he was going to relax.

            “Where’s Shion!”

            “He’s dealing with them, he’s fine – ”

            “You left him there with them?” Nezumi shouted, then turned away from them, headed to Safu’s door, but Safu ran in front of him, beat him to it and stood in front of it.

            “Momoe’s there,” she said.

            Nezumi ignored the heat that flashed down from his chest. “I don’t give a damn, move.”

            “Shion can take care of himself, you know that – ”

            “He’s not invincible, they’re trained to fucking kill him!” Nezumi yelled, reaching out for the doorknob and pulling it as hard as he could – which wasn’t hard at all at the moment – and Safu stayed where she was even when the door pushed at her back.

            “You know why you can’t remember anything? You heard Momoe’s voice in the bakery, and you passed out, Nezumi. Karan and I had to drag you here, what good do you think you’ll be to Shion? The both of you have got some complex that you have to save each other all the time, but you’ll just put him in danger if you go there because he’ll be too preoccupied with saving your ass to watch out for himself!” Safu shouted back.

            Nezumi stopped trying to pull the door open against the barricade of Safu’s body. His legs felt weak, and he concentrated on keeping himself standing.

            “You think Vamp Hunters ever came to the bakery before Shion met you? You think he ever made trips to the JBVIC before you were in his life? You think he was ever in danger like this all the goddamn time before you came around?”

            “Safu, that’s enough,” Karan said sharply, standing beside them now. She still held the glass of water, and she again lifted it toward Nezumi. “Take this and drink it and go lie down in Safu’s room. Safu, go take a walk outside.”

            “Are you kicking me out of my apartment?” Safu nearly shouted.

            “Yes, I am, and don’t you speak to me in that tone,” Karan said back, so forcefully Nezumi found himself reaching out to take the water, if only to stop Karan from throwing it at one of them.

            “Karan, I really don’t need to lie down – ”

            “And don’t you start with me! Both of you are acting like children, bickering all the time. Shion is dealing with Vamp Hunters at this very moment, and you two are shouting at each other like this? You should be embarrassed with yourselves. I’m Shion’s mother, I’m the one who’s allowed to do the worrying, you two are meant to be assuring me that my son will be all right, but instead, look at you two! Unbelievable, I don’t want to deal with either of you,” Karan said roughly, staring at them both until Safu mumbled under her breath and left the apartment.

            Nezumi tried to speak softly to reason with the woman glaring at him. “I can’t just stay here while he – ”

            “You certainly can, and you will. Drink that water and go lie down, I’ll bring you some food.”

            “I really don’t want – ”

            “This is not a discussion, Nezumi. I’m already worried sick about one of my children, don’t make me worry about you too.”

            Nezumi stared down into his glass of water. “You’re not the only one who’s worried,” he said quietly.

            “Oh, honey,” Karan said, and Nezumi felt her tucking his hair behind his ears. “You know that boy loves you too much not to come back home to you. He’ll be just fine, you’ll see.”

            “You just said you were worried.”

            “It’s my job to worry even when there’s nothing to worry about,” Karan said. “It’s not yours. Now go on, go.”

            Nezumi glanced at Safu’s front door, then let Karan push him away from it.

            He’d been in Safu’s room only once before. Her bed was made, and Nezumi sat on the edge of it, placed the glass of water he still hadn’t drunk on her nightstand. He didn’t want to lie down. He felt oddly drained and suspected the moment he laid down and closed his eyes, he’d be asleep, but he didn’t want to be asleep.

            He got up off the bed, went to Safu’s window. A curtain the color of celery was pulled over it, bright and cheerful. Nezumi touched the fabric carefully as he pulled it away to reveal the street outside her apartment. Across from it was Shion’s apartment – except that wasn’t Shion’s apartment anymore.

            Tomorrow, the subletter Shion had found would be moving in. Tomorrow, Shion would be moving out, into the apartment he and Nezumi would own together, would live in together, would grow older in together, like normal people did.

            Nezumi rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window. He could see the corner of the street where Shion would have to walk down when he returned from the bakery.

            Nezumi wasn’t going to stand by this window and wait for him to return. He took his head from the cool glass, unlocked the window, and pulled it up. Safu lived only two floors up, and the jump down from her window into the strip of bushes below was one Nezumi knew he could make.

*

Shion dropped the body he’d been using as a shield. It was the Vamp Hunter dressed as a surgeon. Momoe had shot the surgeon so many times there were no individual bullet holes on his chest, but a mass of bloodied cloth and flesh.

            The surgeon was the fourth Vamp Hunter Shion had used as a shield. The first had been the police officer, whom he’d ducked behind when Momoe began shooting at him. The police officer had fallen, dead, on Shion’s chest, and it’d only made sense to keep him there as protection until his body had too many holes in it, and Shion had to switch to the soldier.

            While the four costumed Vamp Hunters were dead, Momoe was not. She’d killed all of them, and now she was out of bullets. The bakery was empty but for her and Shion.

            As Shion stepped away from the body of the surgeon, he heard sirens coming from outside, far away, and the wail of a fire truck. Someone must have called the police, probably one of Karan’s customers. Shion didn’t think any of them had been injured, that anyone had been in the bakery when Momoe started shooting, but he wasn’t sure. All he knew was there were no other bodies on the floor but the four Vamp Hunters. The smells of their blood mixed and thickened.

            The surgeon’s blood had the most enticing smell. It was a citrus-y sort of scent, tangy and crisp. Shion almost didn’t want to step away from the body that he left against the side of the glass display counter, which had been shattered at some point. Blood splattered the Halloween-themed pastries on display.

            Shion inhaled deep and watched Momoe climb onto a table in the center of the front room. It was the only table that hadn’t been overturned. She stood facing Shion and glanced down at the gun in her hand, then threw it on the floor near the body of the fireman.

            The fireman had been the second Vamp Hunter Momoe had shot dead in her attempt to kill Shion. His blood smelled like a sweet sort of mint, fresh and invigorating.

            Shion didn’t know what Momoe’s blood smelled like. She wasn’t bleeding at all.

            “Normal guns are such a bore,” Momoe was saying. She caught her loose, long hair and pulled it up into a ponytail.

            Shion didn’t move. He wasn’t sure how he wanted to kill her. He wanted her to be in pain. He wanted her to suffer first. He didn’t want it to be immediate.

            “Are you going to kill me?” Momoe asked, once she’d finished tying up her hair.

            Shion didn’t have to think about it. “Yes.”

            Momoe tilted her head. Her smile was light, amused. “Are you trying to think of ways to torture me first?”

            Shion didn’t say anything. He could tell without looking down that the surgeon was bleeding profusely, blood seeping out his body into a puddle that was traveling the few inches to where Shion stood.

            Momoe nodded even though Shion hadn’t replied to her. “It’s not so easy to torture people if you’ve never done it before. First you have to figure out a tool, the implement of the torture. A gun? That’s good for people who don’t like to get their hands dirty. That’s good for beginners, people who aren’t sure about torturing, people who are on the fence, people who still care about morals. It doesn’t feel so bad if you shoot someone in the leg from far away. You feel less guilty about it that way.”

            The sirens were getting closer, but not too close. The street in front of the bakery had been blocked off. It was blocked off every Halloween because there were a lot of little shops on this street with Halloween specials. Kids ran around in their costumes without looking both ways. For years there was always someone getting hit until it was safer just to block the street off so cars could not go by at all.

            Both the guns Momoe had used – first the police officer’s, then the soldier’s when the police officer’s was out of bullets – had mufflers on them, so the gunshots had been silent. The walls of the bakery were sheets of glass but had been plastered today with posters Shion and Nezumi and Safu had made and put up to boast Karan’s Halloween specials. The first thing Shion had done after taking cover behind the body of the police officer was get to the front door and lock it.

            “There’s knives,” Momoe continued, “but to use those, you have to get up close. You have to really want to hurt the person. Your skin will touch their skin. You have to want that, the physical contact between yourself and the person you will hurt. You have to want to torture more than anything in the world. You have to _need_ it, you have to be desperate for it.”

            Momoe lowered herself onto the table, sat with her legs crossed. She leaned forward when she spoke. Her eyes were bright, and her face flushed. She didn’t look scared or worried. She looked thrilled, like everything was going the way she’d hoped, better than she’d hoped.

            “And there’s your bare hands. That’s a great weapon for you. You could crush me with those vamp hands of yours, couldn’t you? You could squeeze me until my insides are a pulp. You could squeeze me harder until everything runs out of my pores like juice. Do you know how much I wished I had hands like yours? The strength of yours? It’s incredible, the pain you can inflict without any weapons at all,” she said, her voice lowering as she spoke to a reverent whisper.

            Shion glanced down at his hands. They were covered in blood, all four of the Vamp Hunters’ blood, a cocktail of smells. He raised his right hand to his lips, licked the tip of his middle finger just to taste it.

            It was incredible. Shion glanced around at the floor of the bakery, covered in this blood, wondered if he could somehow salvage it, contain it, save it for after he finished with Momoe. Maybe he could mix her blood in as well. Maybe it’d taste even better then.

            “But the weapon of your body is a waste on you,” Momoe sighed. “You’re not the physical torturing type. I researched you, you know, after the great government of Japan had us declare you dead. I know who you are, you filthy vamp. You’re a professor. You teach human children.” Momoe giggled, leaned back on the flats of her palms. “Poisoning the minds of the youth. You’re just like me. You prefer psychological torture, that’s what you like. That’s what you did to that beautiful human plaything of yours, is it not? You fucked with his head until he fell in love with you. Brilliant! I love that!”

            Shion hadn’t minded letting Momoe talk. He’d wanted her to talk. Every word she spoke made him more eager to cause her pain. But now, now that she was talking about Nezumi, now Shion didn’t think he needed to hear her talk anymore. Now he didn’t want to wait any longer to hurt her.

            “People think vamps are dumb, but I never thought that. You’re monsters, of course, but monsters are very often intelligent. I must say, I really admire your ability. You deeply affected that gorgeous Nezumi. He refused to speak a word to give you away no matter what I did to that poor man. How did you get him to love a monster like you? Especially the only survivor of the Great Slaughter! I mean, wow, clearly you like a challenge, don’t you? But you know, Shion, I like a challenge too. The ones who are easy to kill, they’re so boring. You’re so much fun.” Momoe grinned at him, and Shion couldn’t hear the sirens anymore, wasn’t sure if they’d retreated completely or if he was the one blocking them out.

            Shion walked forward. He’d decided what he’d do while Momoe had talked. There was a chair overturned beside the table Momoe sat on. He’d break each leg off of it and stick them deep in various places of Momoe’s body. The places he thought would hurt the most.

            One through her stomach. Two through her ribs and into each of her lungs. He wanted to go for her forehead and her throat and her chest, but that might kill her immediately. He wasn’t sure where he’d stick the fourth leg. He thought maybe he could improvise with that one. If he wanted, there were chairs overturned all around the bakery. There were countless legs he could plunge through Momoe’s little body.

            Momoe didn’t seem to care that he was walking towards her. She kept right on talking, didn’t move an inch but for her grinning lips. “You’re much more talented than I am. I couldn’t break Nezumi, I couldn’t make him hate you after you made him love you. I wonder how you did it. I have a theory, can I share it with you before you kill me?”

            Shion was in front of the table now. He reached for the chair right beside it and started snapping the legs off of it.

            Momoe looked down at him but didn’t look at the chair or even pause with each loud _snap!_ of the chair legs. “My theory is that he didn’t fall in love with a vamp at all. Who could do that? I don’t know that it’s possible. My theory is that he fell in love with you thinking you were human. And once you had him trapped, then you revealed yourself. And maybe he resisted. Maybe he was repulsed. Maybe he was terrified – I would be, if I found out I’d been fucking a vamp for months,” Momoe said, frowning now as if imagining it.

            Shion had only broken off three of the legs. He had his hand around the fourth but didn’t break it. He wanted to know the rest of Momoe’s theory.

            Momoe leaned forward, her fingers gripping the edge of the table. “You know, love weakens you. Physically, it really does, the hormones and chemicals that are released, oh, it’s a dangerous thing. It was so easy to hurt that Nezumi of yours once I made him think of all the people he loved. That must have been what you did, right? You weakened him. He couldn’t think straight at all with all those crazy love chemicals, am I right? And you convinced him a vamp was the same as a human. Just the diets were different, that’s all. And he bought it all because he’s a pathetic, weak little thing, lost all his family, was all alone in the world until you. Really, he was the perfect victim for you. Already so vulnerable and sad and alone. So desperate for love and affection, such a longing to be wanted that he’d even let a vamp do the wanting.” 

            Shion snapped off the fourth leg and lunged. He jumped onto the table and had Momoe pinned down flat against it and swiftly thrust one leg of the chair through her left wrist and then through the surface of the wooden table below it, nailing her arm down, then did the same with another leg of the chair and her right wrist.

            Momoe did not cry out. She lay still on the table and looked to her left, then her right. Blood streamed out around the chair legs that went all the way through her wrists.

            “I don’t feel it,” she whispered, looking up at Shion.

            “It’s the shock,” he told her. “You’ll feel it soon.”

            “My blood is getting on the table. You’re letting it go to waste. Aren’t you going to drink it?” Momoe asked. She still didn’t look scared. Only curious.

            Her blood, seeping faster out her wrists now, smelled like overripe fruit, a thick, heavy sweetness.

            Shion still held two chair legs. He looked down at her, could see when the shock started wearing off and the pain began to come in. Her eyes widened. Her breaths turned to gasps, rapidly streaming in and out her lips. Her chest started to heave.

            “Oh,” she whispered. Tears slipped out the corners of her eyes, ran along the sides of her face. She started writhing, and Shion adjusted himself so his weight was over her thighs and she couldn’t kick up at him.

            Her arms jerked, and more blood came out around the chair legs through her wrists.

            “Oh no, oh no, I don’t like this,” she whimpered.

            Shion stared down at her. He had no desire to drink her blood. He hated overly sweet things. He felt the urge to vomit, his stomach twisting.

            “Listen, listen,” Momoe whispered. She made more whimpering sounds between breaths, the sound of a wounded dog.

            Shion tightened his fingers around the third leg of the chair. He’d dropped the fourth and it cluttered on the floor, too softly to be heard under the increasing volume of Momoe’s whimpers.

            “Drink – You have to – You have to drink me dry. Don’t – Don’t let me live after – after you bite – ”

            Momoe cut off the gasps of her own voice to start screaming. She thrashed harder. More of her skin ripped around her wrists. Shion though she might snap her arms in half with her thrashing and set the third chair leg on the table beside her waist in order to hold down her upper arms.

            “Momoe,” Shion said, alarmed now at the pitch of her screams. He found himself letting go of her upper arms. Ripping the legs of the chairs up, out of the table and then out of her wrists, left then right.

            She continued to scream.

            “Momoe, stop! It’s over!” Shion shouted back. He felt numb and slid off of her, off the table, nearly fell because the floors were slippery from blood.

            Momoe’s blood smelled too sweet, and Shion doubled over, pressed his blood-stained hands to his lips to stop himself from vomiting.

            By the time Shion felt it was safe to take his hands from his lips, he realized Momoe had stopped screaming. She was whimpering into her breaths again, and Shion was relieved, looked up at her spread out on the table, blood seeping out the gaping holes in her wrists. The holes were so wide her hands were only connected to her arms with thin strips of sinew and skin.

            “Listen,” Momoe whispered again, and Shion leaned closer to her.

            The sounds of her voice falling into her breaths was such a terrible thing Shion almost wanted to clamp his hand over her lips.

            “When you drink my blood,” she whispered, breathing hard around each word, “you have to drink all of it. You have to kill me. Don’t turn me into a vamp.”

            “I’m not going to kill – ”

            “Listen! My mom was turned into a vamp.”

            Shion stood up straight. Stared down at her and realized she was going to die. Too much blood had left her body. It was all over the table, it was dripping off the sides onto the bakery floor.

            “She asked me to kill her, so I did it. I’m asking you to kill me, so you’ll do it. Right? Won’t you?”

            Her body twitched, a strange convulsion, then stilled again, but her eyes were still on Shion’s.

             “Do you think I’ll see Mom again?” Momoe breathed, and then her eyes closed, but her breaths were still thick and raspy and loud, so Shion picked up the wooden leg of the chair lying beside her and thrust it as hard as he could into her heart.

            She was silent, and Shion heard nothing for less than a second before there were sirens, deafening and right outside the bakery. The flashing lights sneaking through the thin gaps between the posters on the windowfront lit up Momoe’s dead body in rapid streaks of red and white.

*

 


	28. Chapter 28

When Nezumi rounded the corner to the bakery, the source of the sirens came into view, as did the source of the dark smoke thickening the sky.

            The bakery was on fire. In front of it were several police cars, two fire trucks, and an ambulance.

            Nezumi stopped running at the corner of the street. Stared at the burning building. He could feel the heat of the fire in a thick and heavy sheet over his skin even though the bakery was three buildings down from where he stood. He could smell the smoke, not pure charred ash but with a pumpkin-y undercurrent.

             “Sir, this street is being closed down.”

            Nezumi hadn’t even noticed the police officer wielding a wooden street barricade and walking towards him.

            “Is anyone in there?” Nezumi asked the officer, who placed the barricade between himself and Nezumi, blocking Nezumi from walking farther down the sidewalk.

            “I’m not sure, sir.”

            “What happened?”

            “I have no information but that I’m to close down this street,” the police officer said, giving Nezumi another look, pausing this time, his gaze lingering over Nezumi’s eyes.

            Nezumi was accustomed to these lingering gazes, to being recognized as a Gin Dynasty survivor, and was well aware that this recognition often produced pity – pity that he could take advantage of. “I know the owner of that bakery. I just need to know that everyone is okay in there.”

            The police officer paused, glanced behind his shoulder, looked back at Nezumi. “There’s been a few casualties. Five on the ground floor, not sure about the second floor, think they should be about done searching it now though. The bodies haven’t been identified as yet.”

            “Five bodies?” Nezumi repeated, his chest squeezing abruptly.

            “I’m sorry, sir, that’s all I know,” the police officer said, giving Nezumi an apologetic look that Nezumi barely registered before he was running around the barricade and past the officer, who called out to him, but Nezumi didn’t turn back.

            The police cars were parked haphazardly, some halfway onto the sidewalk, and Nezumi had to run around them, dodge officers and firemen until he found himself at the entrance, nearly into the bakery before someone grabbed his arm.

            “You can’t go in there!” the woman said, and Nezumi glanced at her just long enough to see she was an EMT.

            He tried to push her off of him, but then there was someone else grabbing onto his other arm.

            “Hey, calm down there, you’re supposed to rush out of burning buildings, not into them.”

            Nezumi struggled, felt the EMT let go of him only so the second person could latch onto him more strongly from the back, holding both Nezumi’s arms now and pulling Nezumi backwards.

            Nezumi kicked back at the person behind him, missed and lost his footing, heard the man who was dragging him give a startled chuckle.

            “Oh, wow, you’re a wild one. Can’t remember the last time someone tried to kick me. I’m on your side, my friend, that bakery is not a safe place to be right now. Though I do understand the determination to get in, I’ve had their blueberry muffins – oh, man, yeah, I’d run into a burning building for one of those any day. Then again, I run into burning buildings every day, so I guess I’m not the best role model.”

            Nezumi stopped struggling only because he was out of breath. Whatever had happened to him when he’d heard Momoe’s voice had exhausted him more strongly than he’d felt since he was a little kid living on the street, and just jumping out of Safu’s bedroom window and running to the bakery had been enough to have him near collapse.

            The man who pulled him stopped dragging him, and pushed him now until Nezumi’s knees buckled, and he found himself, instead of falling to the ground, sitting.

            Nezumi glanced around, saw that he was sitting on the open back of an ambulance truck. A fireman was standing beside him, holding his hands out warily as if preparing to grab Nezumi again.

            “You gonna try to run back in there?” the fireman asked. He was tall and broad-shouldered and grinning. There was soot all over his face.

            “Did you pull anyone out of there?” Nezumi demanded.

            The fireman had leaned closer to him, seemed to be inspecting Nezumi’s face. He smelled strongly of fire, and Nezumi leaned back.

            “You don’t look so good, my friend.”

            “There were five bodies in there, where are they?”

            The fireman raised his eyebrows, placed his hands on his waist and leaned back. “And how do you know about the five bodies? That’s confidential information.”

            “I need to know who they are,” Nezumi insisted, pushing himself off the bed of the truck, but the fireman pushed him back.

            “Running into that building won’t help you, everyone has been removed. Why don’t you sit tight, and I’ll – ”

            Nezumi pushed himself up again, quicker than the fireman could push him back, but the fireman grabbed him before he could run back to the bakery, his grip absurdly strong around Nezumi’s upper arm.

            “Hey! Keep this up, and I’ll have to use excessive force.”

            Nezumi punched the fireman in the face, was about to kick the man in the groin when he found himself thrown down onto the road, cheek against the gravel and breath knocked out his lungs.

            “Fuck,” Nezumi breathed, pushing his palms against the road and trying to shove himself up, but he was pinned down with what he suspected with the fireman’s knee between his shoulder blades.

            “You know, I think you broke my nose,” the fireman said, his voice muffled.

            “Get the fuck off of me!” Nezumi shouted.

            “You broke my nose!” the fireman shouted back.

            Nezumi stopped trying to push off the road. The asphalt was cool and chilled his skin, a relief from the heat of the smoke wafting out from the bakery.

            “All right. I’m letting you up. Let’s take this slowly, my friend.”

            The pressure against Nezumi’s shoulder blades lifted, and Nezumi laid still for another moment before pushing himself up again, finding no resistance, and managing to stand, though his legs didn’t feel entirely solid.

            “Everyone they found in there, they were taken away already, in two other ambulances,” the fireman said, and Nezumi stared up at him, only vaguely registered that the fireman’s head was tilted up, one hand pinching his nose, and that there was smeared blood over his upper lip.

            “To the hospital? So they’re not dead – ”

            The fireman had taken his hand from his nose and was looking at his bloody fingers, but he glanced back up at Nezumi’s words. “Ah, no, sorry, it’s protocol to take them to the hospital, but they definitely weren’t – Ah, shit. It wasn’t even the fire, that didn’t spread far, didn’t even reach the bodies. Looked like bullet wounds, a lot of foul play, horrific stuff. Something terrible happened in there this afternoon.” The fireman blinked. “Oh, that’s confidential too, though, mind you.”

            Nezumi tried to breathe evenly, tried to speak clearly. “Was there – Did you see any – ”

            The fireman’s frown was grim. “I saw enough. I pulled out two of the men.”

            At this point, Nezumi almost missed the fireman’s grip on his arm. At least that had kept him standing. He swayed on his feet but refused to pass out.

            “Someone you knew was in that bakery,” the fireman said, and it was such a stupid, obvious thing to say that Nezumi didn’t bother to confirm.

            He was trying to remember what Shion was wearing today. The color of his shirt, if he wore his favorite jeans or those dark khakis he surprisingly didn’t look like a dork in or the black slacks he wore when he had meetings with other university staff or the black jeans that he rarely wore at all, but maybe he’d worn them today because Nezumi had told Shion once that he looked sexy in them.

            His apron. He’d probably been wearing his apron, but even that Nezumi couldn’t remember. How could he not remember that?

            “Look, you got a photograph? I don’t know what I’m really allowed to tell you, but if it’s someone you know, you deserve to know, that’s what I think. Didn’t look at IDs, but I know their faces, least the two guys I pulled out.”

            Nezumi glanced at the bakery. Several other firemen were pointing large hoses at it, dousing it with water. A few police officers stood around the building, talking to each other.

            Nezumi had two photographs of Shion on his phone, both selfies Shion had taken of the two of them. His phone was in the bakery kitchen, probably burnt and unusable.

            “I don’t have anything,” Nezumi said, his voice coming out too quietly. He cleared his throat. “He has dark brown hair. Brown eyes. A few inches shorter than I am, maybe five-eleven,” Nezumi listed, but he felt like he was lying about everything but the height, wondered if he should mention the white hair, the red eyes, the scar the fireman might have seen if he’d wiped off Shion’s foundation.

            Just the week before, Shion had changed foundation shades. From _Warm Silk_ to _Natural Sand_. He’d been thrilled about it, told Nezumi he’d never been so healthy in his life to improve from _Warm Silk_ since the Great Slaughter.

            Nezumi wondered if he should mention this to the fireman. Ask if one of the bodies he pulled out was a man wearing _Natural Sand_ foundation.

            “Both the men I got out of there had dark brown hair,” the fireman was saying, and Nezumi shook his head, that wasn’t right, Shion had white hair and maybe he dyed it brown, but that didn’t matter, he couldn’t be dead, Nezumi knew he couldn’t be dead.

            “No, that’s not him,” Nezumi breathed, while the fireman gave him a pitying look, and Nezumi was used to pitying looks, but not for Shion’s death, they’d never been for Shion’s death.

            “Listen, you should really get to the hospital, I haven’t got any concrete information,” the fireman said. Blood was dripping out his nose again, but the fireman did not seem to notice this.

            “What hospital?” Nezumi managed. He reached out, braced his hand against the side of the ambulance to stop himself from falling.

            “Closest one to here, guess that’d be the University of Tokyo Hospital, right?” the fireman asked, and Nezumi nodded vaguely, didn’t know where it was but didn’t really care, he didn’t plan on going there, he knew Shion wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be, not him.

            Nezumi took his hand from the ambulance truck, and the moment he did, his knees buckled, smacked against the asphalt of the road so that pain shot up his legs.

             “Shit, hey, I got you.”

            Nezumi didn’t fight the fireman when he grabbed Nezumi’s arms again, pulled Nezumi up, braced Nezumi back against the bed of the ambulance.

             “Stay right here,” the fireman said, and then he was gone, and Nezumi didn’t go anywhere because he had nowhere to go.

            Shion was fine. He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead, so Nezumi didn’t have to go to the hospital to find him, because Shion wouldn’t be at the hospital.

            Nezumi leaned against the side of the ambulance truck bed. The doors were swung open, ready for anyone that had to be wheeled into the ambulance and whisked away to the hospital.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure how long he sat until the fireman was back, a female EMT at his side. Maybe the same EMT that had stopped Nezumi from running into the bakery, but he wasn’t sure, hadn’t taken a good look at her then and didn’t take a good look at her now.

            “This is Sana. She’ll give you a ride to the hospital. Right?” the fireman said, glancing at the EMT, who nodded.

            “Sure will. And what’s your name?” she said, speaking to Nezumi like he was a child.

            “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

            “I’m headed there anyway, nothing more for me to do here. Might as well give you a lift, right?” she asked, in such a way that Nezumi couldn’t think of an argument even though he didn’t need to go to the hospital in the first place, even though there was no way Shion was there, there was no way Shion had died like everyone else had.

            The EMT helped Nezumi off the bed of the truck, and as she led Nezumi around to the front of the ambulance, the fireman squeezed his shoulder.

            “You take care then,” the fireman said. He still had blood dripping out his nose, and it was this Nezumi looked at to avoid having to look at the fireman’s pitying gaze.

            “Yeah,” Nezumi said, because the fireman seemed to be expecting something from him, and Nezumi just wanted the guy to let go of him.

            The fireman let go, and Nezumi slammed the passenger door of the ambulance closed.

            The EMT didn’t speak to Nezumi while she drove, and for this, Nezumi was relieved. He stared out the window, thought the last time he was in a car might have been his Uber from Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital. He closed his eyes rather than watch the street. He didn’t want to be in this car. He would rather have taken the subway, where he could have gotten off at any stop he wanted, where he could have stayed on the carriage even when it passed the stop closest to the hospital, where he could have let himself be taken far away from anywhere near here, and then he could have chosen not to ever come back.

*

Shion wished he’d had time to take a shower after he’d lit the fire in the kitchens, but the police were already breaking down the front doors of the bakery, so he had to get out immediately.

            He lit a stovetop, dipped the edges of several dishcloths into the flames, threw them around the kitchen, grabbed Nezumi’s phone that he saw laying on the counter open to an image of a grinning jack-o’-lantern, then ran out the back of the bakery.

            Shion was fully aware he was covered in blood. He’d grabbed a handful of dishcloths before leaving and used them to hastily mop up the blood on his face and hair and hands and arms. He took off the apron he’d been wearing and found the t-shirt underneath had just suffered a light spattering, mostly on the shoulders and arms, almost like it was part of the t-shirt design.

            Shion discarded the dishcloths and apron and his sneakers in a dumpster two blocks away, in the opposite direction from Safu’s apartment, then doubled back. He realized, on making his way back to Safu’s apartment, that it didn’t matter if there were remnants of blood on his arms or face he hadn’t managed to wipe off. He’d blend in with people dressed for Halloween. He could pretend his costume was a murderer on the run from the law. He could pretend it was just a disguise, it was just for fun.

            Shion walked into the lobby of Safu’s apartment building to find Safu on one of the lobby sofas, hunched over, her elbows on her knees and her head lowered, seemingly staring at the floor between her feet, her fingers weaved through her hair.

            “Safu?”

            Safu lifted her head up, her fingers trickling from her hair, then shot up off the sofa and sprinted towards him.

            “Is that blood or poison on your neck?” she asked quickly.

            Shion touched his neck. “Blood. Are you okay?”

            “Your mother kicked me out of my apartment. But you shouldn’t be asking me if I’m okay, I should be asking if you’re okay. Are you okay? We should go up,” Safu said, all at once, then grabbed Shion’s hand and pulled him to the stairs.

            They walked quickly, Safu freeing her hand from Shion’s as they climbed in order to look at the blood that was now on her fingers.

            “Is it Momoe’s?”

            Shion could smell the blood, knew the particular drops on Safu’s fingers were from the surgeon. “Not the blood on your hand. But she’s dead.”

            Safu stopped walking, and Shion only noticed when he was three stairs ahead of her. He turned back, looked down at her.

            “She is?”

            Shion nodded.

            “Are you okay?”

            “Why wouldn’t I be?” Shion asked, but at the same time he remembered the sounds of Momoe’s screams, the way her blood spurted out the holes in her wrists even when the legs of the chairs were out of them. He remembered her whimpers and her breathy voice and the strange words she’d offered him before she’d died.

            “Anyone else?” Safu asked, climbing up the stairs to catch up to Shion now, and they kept walking, reaching Safu’s floor after one flight.

            Shion opened the stairwell doorway to let Safu walk before him. “Four others, all Vamp Hunters that came with Momoe. No one else from what I could tell.”

            “And no one saw you?” Safu asked, at her door now, knocking on it. “I left my key inside,” she explained.

            “I don’t think anyone saw me, but – ”

            The door opened then, and Karan was immediately pulling Shion toward her, kissing his face.

            “Mom, stop, there’s blood on me – ”

            “I knew you’d be fine,” Karan said, and it sounded like she was nearly crying, so Shion let her kiss him all over his face before she stopped only to pull him inside Safu’s apartment. “You’re all right?” she asked.

            Shion nodded, glancing around behind her. “I’m fine, Mom. Where’s Nezumi?”

            “Resting in Safu’s room.”

            “How is he?”

            “Just drained,” Safu said now, closing the door behind him. “He should be okay, I told him I wanted to have sessions with him once a week. He wasn’t really interested in the idea, but I’m sure you could convince him.”

            “What, like therapy?” Shion asked, heading to Safu’s room.

             “I am certified, you know,” Safu said, following Shion. “And I think we both know Nezumi will never talk to a stranger. I can help him.”

             “Maybe you should let him rest, honey,” Karan said, as she’d followed them too. She placed her hand on Shion’s arm when he’d reached out for the doorknob. “Why don’t you take a shower, wash off a little?”

            “Yeah, you’ve got specks of blood all over you,” Safu added, wrinkling her nose.

            Shion paused, remembered he hadn’t yet told them. “There’s something else,” he said, and he looked only at his mother now, who blinked at him.

            “What is it?”

            Shion bit the inside of his cheek, released it. “I had to start a fire in the kitchens. People heard me shouting ‘fire’ when I was trying to make everyone evacuate, some of my students were there, some regular customers who know us were there too, it would be suspicious if there wasn’t a fire. I couldn’t let us be linked to what happened with the Vamp Hunters – It’s your bakery, I know it’s your life, but there wasn’t any other way – ”

            “Oh, honey, are you worried about that? That’s not a bakery, that’s just a building. The bakery survives so long as the bakers do. And you know that bakery isn’t my life anyway. You are, all of you are,” Karan said, reaching out to squeeze both Shion and Safu’s hands.

            Shion wished he could be reassured, but he wouldn’t be until he found out the damage to the bakery.

            “And Nezumi too, of course,” Karan added, glancing back at Safu’s closed door.

            “He’s sleeping?” Shion asked.

            “Emotional ordeals manifest physically. He could barely stand. It’d do him well to rest, the body and the mind feed off each other,” Safu said.

            “If he wasn’t asleep, he’d have been out here the moment he heard your voice,” Karan said, smiling lightly, and Shion nodded.

            He didn’t want to wake Nezumi, especially when he had Momoe’s blood on him still. He wanted all of Momoe washed away before he saw Nezumi again, so he let Safu find him a spare towel and push him into her bathroom.

            He stripped his clothes – his stained white t-shirt and the black jeans he knew Nezumi liked, though Shion found them too tight to be practical or comfortable, and got into Safu’s shower. He scrubbed the blood that remained from his body, tilted his head up to the spray and felt no remorse.

            Maybe Momoe had a tragic backstory. Maybe she was unwell, messed up after killing her own mother on her own mother’s wishes. Maybe her screams lingered in Shion’s ears still, maybe her whimpers did too.

            But the image of Nezumi’s body, covered in blood that Momoe had tortured out of him, that wasn’t a maybe. And Nezumi’s shouts each night weren’t maybes. And the fear on Nezumi’s face when he’d heard Momoe earlier that day in the bakery squeezed his chest harder than any of Momoe’s screams had.

            Shion turned off the shower when the water ran clear, dried himself with Safu’s towel, and found that she’d put clothes out for him, one of her oversized t-shirts and a pair of men’s boxers that she wore as pajamas.

            Shion pulled them on, hung his towel on one of the hooks along the door, and left the bathroom. The steam of it chased him out into the hall, where he could hear Karan and Safu’s quiet voices from the kitchen, but he didn’t go to them. He went across the hall, to Safu’s bedroom, and when he opened the door, he was hit by a gust of wind that cooled his warm skin almost instantly.

            The bed was empty, but this didn’t explain the wind. Shion looked around the room, as if Nezumi might pop out at him from some corner, but there was no Nezumi. There was, however, an open window, and Safu’s bright green curtains fluttered out from it, catching the wind that streamed through it from the October night.

            Shion didn’t walk in to close the window despite the cool air that flooded Safu’s apartment. He left the doorway, walked to the kitchen and expected to find Nezumi there, holding a cup of tea between his hands, maybe listening to Karan and Safu’s conversation or maybe reading a book or maybe looking up, having heard the bathroom door opening, and waiting for Shion to enter the room.

            But Nezumi wasn’t there. It was just Karan and Safu who looked up.

            “What’s wrong?” Karan asked, standing up from the kitchen table.

            “Where’s Nezumi?”

            “He’s in my room, remember?” Safu asked, speaking slowly.

            “He’s not in your room. The window’s open,” Shion said, giving these clues to Safu so she could come up with some solution because he didn’t want to think at all, he just wanted to see Nezumi in front of him.

            “Oh shit,” Safu whispered, running out the kitchen to her room.

            “He’s not there?” Karan asked.

            “He’s not here!” Safu shouted, from her bedroom.

            “Where is he?” Shion asked again, loudly. His instinct was to call Nezumi, but Shion himself had Nezumi’s phone.

            Safu had appeared back in the kitchen. “It’s possible he jumped out the window,” she said, after a moment, then immediately went to the closet beside her front door, crouched, and began rummaging through it, throwing different pairs of shoes behind her.

            “What are you doing?” Shion asked, crouching beside her, and not a second later a pair of pale pink Keds were thrust into his chest.

             “Put these on. They’re too big for me, they might fit you. What happened to your shoes?”

            “There’s blood on them,” Shion said, standing and shoving his feet in the shoes, finding them tight but tolerable. “You said he could barely stand. So he can’t have gotten far. Maybe it’d be better to stay here and wait, he’ll probably come back.”

            “It’s best to look for him, he’s not himself, it’s not a good thing for him to be on his own right now.”

            “What does that mean?” Shion asked, as Safu put on her own shoes and pulled him to the front door.

            Safu didn’t answer him, turning to Karan instead, who’d drifted to the front door beside them. “Can you stay here, wait for him if he comes back? Call me if he does.”

            “Of course, honey,” Karan said, then squeezed Shion’s arm. “I’m sure he’s fine, but Safu’s right to go look for him. He looked a little shaky, it’s best if he’s home as quickly as possible.”

            Shion did not find his mother’s words reassuring. He headed out of Safu’s apartment after Safu, trying to keep up and question her at the same time.

            “Am I missing something? You said he was just drained. You said he’d be okay.”

            “Yes, that’s right,” Safu said vaguely, running down the stairs, then swiftly through the lobby, out the building with Shion a step beside her.

            He stopped questioning her when they got outside where they could hear sirens, and just a look at the sky revealed that it had darkened not only with the night but with smoke.

            “How big was that fire you started?” Safu asked, her voice hushed as an ambulance drove past them, coming from the direction of the bakery.

            “It wasn’t that big!” Shion insisted, but he wasn’t sure, and they started to run down the sidewalk.

            When they turned around the corner to the bakery, the sidewalk was barricaded. Safu ignored this and walked right by it.

            “Safu, you’re not supposed to walk here, it’s dangerous,” Shion hissed, first from behind the barricade, then running around it and catching up to Safu. “Fire doesn’t affect me. Let me look for him, you should go back,” he told her, looking around the randomly assembled EMTs and firemen and police officers for one man who would always stand out in any crowd.

            “Hey, you two!” A fireman was trotting toward Shion.

            Shion stopped walking and pulled Safu to stop as well a few feet from the bakery entrance to wait for the fireman. He felt the heat wafting off the building, heavy on his arms and drying his wet hair.

            The fireman was holding a bloody tissue to his nose, but he thrust his other hand out in front of Shion, as if that could stop Shion from going any farther.

            “We’re looking for someone,” Safu shouted, probably to be heard over the wail of the sirens.

            “Isn’t everyone,” the fireman muttered. His voice was muffled, half his mouth covered by his hand that held the tissue. “You can’t be back here, my friends. We got those barricades for a reason. Fire’s under control now, but smoke is a dangerous thing, and this building hasn’t been confirmed stable.”

            Shion glanced at the bakery, wondering at its stability, while Safu continued to fire questions at the fireman.

           “He’s from the Gin Dynasty. Silver eyes. Long dark hair. Have you seen him?” she asked, almost aggressively.

            The fireman blinked. “Well, shit. Wearing an apron with a woman in a yellow bikini?”

            “That’s him,” Shion breathed, relieved, his shoulders slumping. Beside him, however, he could feel that Safu was still tense.

            “That friend of yours broke my nose,” the fireman said, pointing at his nose.

            “Where is he?” Safu asked, still urgently.

            “Went to the hospital, just missed him,” the fireman said, gesturing down the road with a jerk of his chin.

            Shion voice nearly caught in his throat. “The hospital?”

            “University of Tokyo Hospital. Ah, no, he’s not hurt,” the fireman said quickly, dropping his hand from his nose and glancing at the bloody tissue once before looking back at Shion and Safu. “He just needed a lift, an EMT took him. Front of the ambulance – that’s some jargon for you. Means he’s unharmed, you know, cause if you’re in the back of the ambulance, that’s not good.”

            “University of Tokyo Hospital?” Safu asked, probably to confirm, but the fireman was now looking closely at Shion.

            “Say, would you say you’re about five-eleven?” the fireman asked.

            “Thanks for the information,” Safu said, before Shion could reply. She grabbed Shion’s arm and began pulling him away.

            “Why would he ask about my height? Wait, Safu, stop pulling me so hard, where are you going? The closest subway station is the other way,” Shion said, trying not to trip as he stumbled after Safu, who weaved them around firetrucks and police cars.

            “We’re taking an Uber, let’s get away from this street so there’s less traffic,” Safu explained.

            They ran together, past the barricade to the side of the street they were allowed to be on, and then two blocks more until Safu stopped them and pulled out her phone, pressing the Uber app.

            “It’ll be here in three minutes,” she said, after requesting one. She bounced on her toes, looking down the street as if three minutes had already passed.

            Shion felt much more relaxed, knowing Nezumi was with an EMT. No matter how physically or emotionally drained he was, he would be fine if he wasn’t alone. “Why are you so worried? He’s with an EMT, nothing will happen to him.”

            Safu glanced at him for hardly a full second before looking away. “What if he thinks you died?”

            Shion squinted. “He wouldn’t. He’d wait until there was evidence before jumping to a conclusion like that. We’ll find him at the hospital, and everything will be fine.”

            Safu shook her head, kept looking up and down the street. “Maybe,” she said, not sounding convinced. Before Shion could ask her anything else, she was grabbing Shion’s arm. “Look, I think that’s the Uber! Oh, yes, that’s the sticker on the front dashboard, right?”

            The car pulled up in front of them, and Safu got in before confirming the Uber was for them, so Shion was the one who had to confirm with the driver before he got in beside her.

            He closed the door and buckled in, and they were on their way, Safu telling the Uber driver to go as fast as he could. The sirens faded the farther the Uber took them away from the bakery.

*

Nezumi let the EMT lead him into the hospital, but the moment she stopped to catch up with one of the nurses she knew, he slipped away. He did not continue down to the morgue where they’d been heading but walked right back out the entrance of the hospital.

            The sky was dark, but the city street was busy, filled with people still celebrating Halloween. Just standing outside the hospital, Nezumi saw several people dressed as vamps walking by. He stopped to watch them, but it was useless. None of them were real vamps, of course. None of them could be Shion.

            It was not the first time Nezumi wasn’t sure where to go. It was not the first time Nezumi had no idea what to do. It was not the first time Nezumi felt hopeless and empty and lost.

            But the last time, he’d been seven years old. He was older now. He was an adult. He was supposed to be more capable now. Before, he’d lost thousands of people, and now, he’d just lost one.

            He could get over that. He could move past it. He could be fine again.

            He repeated this to himself, inwardly, as he watched more vamps walk on the sidewalk in front of the hospital entrance. He searched each of their faces, even though he knew better.

            He’d known better from the start than to ever love anyone again, and he’d fucked that up, and he couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that again. He knew better than to want the dead to come back to him. He knew better than to want this so badly it hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before.

*

When the Uber pulled up at the hospital, Safu jumped out before the car stopped and ran into the front entrance.

            Shion ran after her, caught up to her at the front desk in time to hear her telling the woman behind the desk, “I need you to make an announcement for me.”

            The woman behind the desk looked up from her computer. “Sorry?”

            Safu strung her fingers through Shion’s without even looking at him. “Our son. We lost him, he’s very young and he’s lost, we can’t find him, can you please ask for him? His name is Nezumi. Can you tell him his family is by the front desk?”

            The woman nodded quickly, reached for the phone, pressed a button on the receiver, and when she spoke into it, her voice came out over the loudspeaker, from the corners of the ceiling.

            “Will Nezumi please come to the front desk on the ground floor? Your parents are here and very worried about you. I’ll repeat, Nezumi, if you can hear me, please come to the front desk, it’s on the first floor of the hospital, find an adult to help you if you need it, anyone in blue nurses’ scrubs, all right?”

            The woman placed the phone back into the receiver, smiled at Shion and Safu. “How’s that?”

            “Thank you,” Shion said, pulling Safu a few feet away from the desk. “Why are you acting so panicked? What’s going on?”

           “She said his parents were here. I told her to say family, not parents,” Safu whispered.

            “So? He’s not going to think it’s his actual parents. He’ll know it’s us.”

            Safu freed her hand from Shion’s, pressed her palm to her forehead. “I don’t know…” she murmured, looking around the hospital lobby, as urgently as she’d searched the street for the Uber.

            “Safu, what are you talking about? Nezumi is fully aware his parents are dead.”

            Safu dropped her hand and looked at Shion almost warily. “Look. I don’t want you to freak out, okay?”

            “What?” Shion demanded.

            Safu licked her lips. Glanced around the lobby again, then looked back at Shion, her gaze harder now. “I know about Momoe. People started talking about her at work when she first became a Vamp Hunter.”

            Shion leaned closer, not sure he’d heard correctly. “What?”

            “She revolutionized the field of psychological warfare in a way it’s never been done before. She became this luminary, a phenomenon of sorts. I didn’t pay too much attention, my specialty isn’t psychological torture, but I heard enough about her. I don’t know the extent of the influence she might have had on Nezumi, but it could be serious. It could really affect him, beyond the expected repercussions of physical torture on recovering victims.”

            Shion stared at her. Her words seemed slippery, difficult to concentrate on. When he finally managed to grasp them, to understand them, he felt heat flood him. “What?” he asked again, only vaguely aware that now he’d shouted the word.

            Safu held up her hands. “Don’t freak out!” she said quickly. “Just listen, you need to understand that Momoe has certain abilities, ways of manipulating the mind. I can’t say for sure what she did to Nezumi, and he is experienced at denial and ignoring trauma, so he never revealed it much until today, hearing Momoe’s voice in the bakery. I think it triggered a different psychological state, likely the one he was in when Momoe was torturing him. You said Nezumi wouldn’t jump to conclusions without evidence, and maybe normally, he wouldn’t, but he’s much more emotionally vulnerable right now. Most likely, his mindset has shifted to one very similar to what he had right after the Great Slaughter, after he lost everyone. It’s probable he’ll reflexively believe you’re dead because to him, it would make sense. The people he loves die, it’s the natural course of things.”

            Shion could hardly focus on what Safu was saying about Nezumi’s mindset, distracted by the other piece of information she’d admitted. “You knew about Momoe? You knew who she was, and you never mentioned it?” Shion repeated, unsure, still, that he’d heard correctly, unsure how this was possible.

            Safu spoke quietly, looked at Shion carefully. “You need to calm down before you lose it in here and expose yourself as a vamp.”

            Shion let Safu pull him to a corner of the lobby, lean him against a wall where he tried to breathe evenly, tried not to imagine the things Momoe had done to Nezumi that he hadn’t even known about, that didn’t reveal itself in bruises and cuts and broken bones and blood.

            “What does this mean? What are you trying to say? He might forget his parents are dead and think that announcement was actually from them?”

            “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I have no idea what kinds of things will affect him. Maybe that announcement might upset him, maybe not, I don’t know, Shion,” Safu said, speaking slowly and gently in a way that was infuriating. “I don’t know what he’s thinking right now. My best guess is he’s just very afraid, primed to believe the worst and act differently than the Nezumi we know. It’s more than likely Momoe’s voice triggered him to revert to a childlike way of thinking. A more panicked, irrational, impulsive mindset.”

            Shion shook his head, felt overwhelmed and confused. “You really think he thinks I’m dead? There’s no reason for him to think that, in the Great Slaughter his family died right in front of him, but now – ”

            “I can’t read Nezumi’s mind, Shion, I can only guess. Momoe put him in a mindset of fear and loss and grief, and those feelings could easily coerce him into thinking you died without having seen it, just from what little information he knows about what happened at the bakery – you were in there with Vamp Hunters and you were in danger.”

            “So what do we do? I can’t call him. I have no way to get in contact with him,” Shion said, feeling helpless, looking around the hospital to see if Nezumi might have appeared.

            “We give him two more minutes to get to us, but really, I don’t think he’s here,” Safu said, looking around as well. “When his family died, what did he do? He left Kyoto, and he never went back. He pushed his memories of his family away, he denied his own grief to protect himself. That’s likely what he’ll try to do now. It’s his instinct to put as much distance as he can between himself and his loss.”

            Shion stared at his friend. “If he leaves Tokyo, we have no way of finding him. We have no way of knowing where he’ll go. That’s what you’re saying, Safu, right? Are you telling me he’ll want to leave and never come back, is that what you mean?”

            Safu’s shoulders fell, and she replied so softly Shion almost didn’t hear her above the bustle of the hospital. “Yes.”

*

At first, Nezumi stood in the subway carriage, the seats taken by vamps and devils and bunnies and maids and strange hooded figures with various plastic weaponry and cloaked people with pointed hats and others with colorful hair in strange clothing and make-up that Nezumi assumed were meant to emulate characters from some kind of anime or video game.

            But the more the subway took Nezumi out the center of Tokyo and into the outskirts of the city, the less clusters of people were coming in, and the more the seats emptied, and after a while all of Nezumi’s carriage was empty but for himself and two other people sitting at the front, both wearing normal clothes, though they each had a rubbery horse head resting on their laps.

            Nezumi, by then, had taken a seat as well, in the back of the carriage, in an aisle seat from which he could watch the rubbery horse heads jiggle like Jell-O with each movement and curve and jolting stop and start of the carriage.

            He’d gotten on the subway on the Marunouchi Line at the hospital but transferred at the Ginza subway stop to the Ginza line, and from there kept on transferring until he found himself at the very end of the Chiyoda line, closest to the Narita International Airport. At this last subway stop, Nezumi got out alongside the couple with horse heads. In the main terminal, Nezumi split ways with the horse-headers, who slid their subway cards and left up the escalators. Nezumi’s subway card didn’t apply so far out of central Tokyo, and Nezumi had to pay extra fare, then buy another ticket to get on a bus to the airport.

            Nezumi had never been on a plane before, so he wasn’t sure if he was scared of flying or not. He doubted it. There were things much worthier of his fear than plummeting out of the sky.

            It was only when Nezumi was in the bus to the airport, sitting with his shoulder pressed to a cool window and the seat empty beside him, that he realized he did not have a passport. He could not travel out of Japan. He wasn’t sure if he could get to one of the islands without a passport, but even this was not of much concern. He didn’t really have a particular destination in mind. It wasn’t important, where he ended up.

            By the time he got to the airport, it was no longer Halloween, but early morning November first, though the sun would not be up for several hours. Nezumi stood near the entrance, the night at his back, and read the blinking electronic signs surrounding him. Some directed him to terminals, others to ticket kiosks and counters, others to baggage drop-offs and baggage claims.

            Nezumi had no bags. All of his possessions were packed up in cardboard boxes in his old apartment and in Shion’s bedroom to be moved to the new apartment where he and Shion were supposed to move in together, but of course now that would not happen. Nezumi was not sorry to leave all he’d owned behind. There was nothing he owned that he’d ever been very attached to.

            Whatever in his life that he could not replace, Nezumi knew he would learn to live without.

*


	29. Chapter 29

When Nezumi never showed up at the front desk of the hospital, Shion did not keep looking for him.

            He went, instead, to the bakery, and found the building cleared for entrance, its foundations still strong despite the fire damage, which had mostly been contained in the kitchen. The kitchen was completely destroyed, but outside the kitchen, the bakery seemed more or less the same as it always had.

            Shion went upstairs, checked that none of the boxes crowding his bedroom were touched by the fire, then left again, returned to Safu’s apartment, where he and Karan were spending the night. He slept on Safu’s couch, insisting his mother share Safu’s bed with her, and spent most of the night staring up at the ceiling between glancing at his phone to check for calls from unknown numbers that might be Nezumi, from wherever he was.

            The next day, Shion got up early despite not having slept most of the night. After drinking his morning bag of blood, he emailed his students that class was cancelled and rented the moving van from the company he and Nezumi had researched and decided on, since neither of them had cars themselves. Before picking up the van, Shion took the subway to the new apartment, picked up the keys from the landlord as Nezumi was supposed to do. He went next to the moving company’s lot, got the van he’d rented, and drove it to the bakery first, hauled the boxes down the stairs and into the truck. He’d already moved everything from his old apartment to the bakery, so the only boxes left were those at Nezumi’s apartment, where Shion drove the truck next. He had never driven in Tokyo before, did not even have his license, and he handled the road with difficulty with the little knowledge he knew from Googling driver’s ed videos on how the pedals and gears worked and strategies for staying in the middle of the lane.

            He drove slowly and onto the sidewalk curb several times, but made it to Nezumi’s apartment without any accidents, which he considered a success. It was Nezumi, who was supposed to drive. One of his coworkers at the theater had taught him to drive when he was nineteen, and Nezumi even had a license, though he’d told Shion that he hadn’t driven since he’d gotten it.

            Shion had made a copy of Nezumi’s key for himself weeks before and pressed his thumb along the grooves of this key while he rode the elevator up to Nezumi’s apartment.

            He knew Nezumi would not be in his apartment. He knew better than to hope that it would be so easy, to open Nezumi’s apartment door and find him there. But he couldn’t help himself from hoping anyway, and when he swung the apartment door open and was met by silence and darkness, his stomach fell.

            Nezumi only had two boxes of clothing and kitchenware in his apartment. They had planned to collect these boxes from Nezumi’s apartment and take them to the bakery after closing the bakery on Halloween, but of course that had not happened, and Nezumi’s landlord didn’t seem to care that Nezumi had left his boxes here one night past the end of his lease. Shion took each box down one at a time, not in any rush. He had just carried down the second and last box when he heard someone shout –

            “Hey, you!”

            Shion was outside the apartment building, standing by the open back of the van, which he’d parked in front of the building despite being unsure whether or not such parking was illegal. He placed the box into the van alongside the others and shut the doors before turning to the sidewalk and seeing Nezumi’s neighbor standing on the curb right beside the van.

            “Oh, hi,” Shion said. He raised his wrist to wipe the back of it over his forehead. It was a cold morning, the first day of November and feeling drastically more like winter than any day in October had, but lifting boxes had warmed Shion, made him hot enough to strip his jacket and push the sleeves of his sweater to his elbows and feel sweat beading along his hairline and in a trail between his shoulder blades.

            Nezumi’s neighbor seemed overly affected by the change in weather, was wearing a puffy white coat that went down over her knees and seemed in the process of swallowing her whole.

            The girl walked right up to Shion, stared at him with an unarguably angry look for several seconds, then in a sudden and practiced movement, swung her fist back by her waist, then swiftly forward so that it plunged deep up into Shion’s stomach.

            Instantly, the air emptied from his body, and his legs buckled. He gasped and fell to the sidewalk, throwing out his hands to catch himself so all of his weight wasn’t on his knees.

            On all fours on the sidewalk, Shion fought to catch his breath. He didn’t think he’d ever been hit so hard in his life, worried for a full minute that he’d never be able to breathe properly again, but then it got easier, and he was able look up.

            The girl towered in front of him, hands on her hips.

            “If you get up again I’ll just punch you back down,” she said, her voice and expression hard, both lacking the cheer and bubbliness Shion had come to expect from her. “And don’t you try to fight me, I know several forms of martial arts, and I will not hesitate to incapacitate you if you lay a finger on me.”

            “Why would I try to hurt you?” Shion gasped. His voice came out oddly, a raspy sound. He didn’t bother trying to stand up from the curb.

            Nezumi’s neighbor pointed down at him. “You know what you are. You know what you did to my neighbor.”

            Shion worked to stay calm. It wasn’t impossible that this girl knew he was a vamp. He tried to think back on all the times he’d run into her before. There couldn’t have been more than two or three occasions. The first time he’d met her, he’d been a mess, sitting on the floor against Nezumi’s door, as Nezumi had only just found out he was a vamp. Maybe that was when he’d slipped up. Maybe Nezumi had.

            “I won’t hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Shion said quietly, and the girl’s glare only narrowed.

            “Abuse is not an accident, it’s a purposeful and repeated act of malice!” she nearly shouted, and Shion thought she sounded a bit like she was repeating a mantra she’d said many times.

            It was only after several seconds that Shion remembered Nezumi mentioning that his neighbor was under the impression Shion hit him. The memory felt vague, not entirely solid, and Shion couldn’t exactly pinpoint when Nezumi had told him this, and if he’d offered any explanation as to why his neighbor had come to this conclusion, or if Nezumi had attempted to correct her.

            Shion stood up, then, slowly and stepping back as he did so, farther from the neighbor.

            “He deserves better than you!” the girl continued, and she looked oddly close to tears now, her hands in fists just barely visible below the puffy sleeves of her jacket. “Love is a pure thing, and people deserve to have it without giving the safety of their minds and bodies in return!”

            Again, the words came in a practiced way, like the reciting of a pamphlet she’d memorized, a manifesto on the injustice of domestic abuse.

            Shion didn’t correct her. He had never hit Nezumi but even so wasn’t sure if he was innocent of what his neighbor accused.     

            He couldn’t help but think, too, of Momoe’s praise, offered to him like he was some sort of psychological torturer too, like he had been the cause of Nezumi’s suffering just as much as she had.

            “I’m sorry,” Shion heard himself whispering. His own eyes burned. He stepped back again, from the girl and off the curb onto the thin strip of road between the sidewalk and where he’d parked the moving van. When he stepped back again, his back hit the side of the van.

            “What good is sorry?” the girl demanded. She sounded almost hysterical now, and Shion knew, on some level, that she was probably not speaking to him, that her words were not actually meant to be directed at him, but at someone in her own life, someone she knew, but he accepted her anger and hurt anyway. He wanted to hear it, all that he had done wrong.

            Shion pressed himself flat against the van. He had not felt exhaustion from hardly sleeping all night until this point, when it seemed to hit him all at once as Nezumi’s neighbor continued. Behind her, a sparse crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, people stopping and staring.

            “Will sorry take away the fear he felt? Will sorry take away the bruises and the blood? Will sorry take away the nightmares that still won’t go away, no matter what I do, no matter how long it’s been?”

            The girl quickly quieted, seemed to realize she’d slipped up, spoken about herself instead of Nezumi, and she slapped her hand over her lips. Tears had leaked from the corners of her eyes and made bright streaks over her cheeks.

            Shion said nothing. He didn’t try to comfort her. He let her continue to stare at him, and then she whirled around, walked quickly to the apartment building, disappeared through the entrance.

            After she left, the few people who’d stopped on the sidewalk dispersed, continuing on wherever they were going. Shion, too, knew he should get going. He’d reasoned, in some late hour of his sleepless night, that if he got the new apartment ready, if he moved in and set up all of their belongings and furnished it and unpacked, then Nezumi might be drawn to it, somehow, might sense there was a home waiting for him and might come back.

            It had been a stupid thought, a hopeless want. Shion didn’t know how to get in contact with Nezumi when Nezumi didn’t have his phone and could have been anywhere. Shion did not know how he could possibly bring Nezumi back, and now, standing against the van with his sweat cooling and chilling him and looking at the place where Nezumi’s neighbor had just stood, heartbroken and hurt, Shion wasn’t sure if Nezumi should come back.     

            Maybe he’d be better off, wherever he was. Maybe a life without Shion was the life Nezumi could be happiest, most at peace.

*

Nezumi could not get on a plane without a passport, not even to anywhere else within Japan, as per new flight restrictions that had been put in place since the blood heist at Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital.

            The restrictions would possibly be revoked soon, now that it’d been a month and a half since Japan was told by the government its Tokyo vamp was dead, but maybe not. Nezumi didn’t know what information would be gathered and publicized after whatever had happened at the bakery between the Vamp Hunters and Shion. Maybe the country would again be on high-alert. Or maybe the government wouldn’t even release information that Vamp Hunters and a vamp had been involved.

            None of the particulars mattered to Nezumi. What mattered was that he couldn’t get on a plane, he couldn’t go any farther than where he stood.

            In the subway station by University of Tokyo Hospital, Nezumi had found an ATM and taken most of his savings out of his bank account in cash. It was possible that Karan or Safu would want to find him, to tell him of Shion’s death, but Nezumi had no desire to be found and didn’t want to be traced by his credit cards.

            He had a good amount of savings, now cash in his pocket, and was much better off than he had been as a little kid. He did not feel worried about his own survival, about having to start over somewhere else, about being on his own. There was sadness and loneliness, but not worry or fear, and Nezumi knew he was lucky for that. Sadness and loneliness were pointless emotions, had nothing to do with surviving or alerting him of danger or keeping his senses sharp, so Nezumi knew they were better off ignored, better off denied, better off done away with, the quickest he could manage.

            After Nezumi had been told he could not go anywhere without a passport, he’d left the airport and took an Uber to the closest hotel. He’d spent the last remaining hours of the early morning before the sun rose lying awake in a bed that was not his, with sheets tucked in too tight and flat pillows and no vampire sleeping beside him.

            He’d been awake still, when the sun rose outside his window, which gave him a view of the pool and part of the parking lot. Nezumi had turned his head on his flat pillow to watch the sky change colors. He had not cried.

            Now, the sun was high up to mark midday, and Nezumi was three hours away from the hotel by foot, walking because to walk, he didn’t need to have a destination. Ubers and taxis required addresses, and Nezumi didn’t even want to pick a line on the subway to follow. He wanted to go somewhere on accident, to find himself somewhere he didn’t even know the name of. He wanted to give himself an excuse to feel lost that was justifiable by geography and not just the way his heart felt, detached from his arteries and too small like a shrunken thing that didn’t belong in his chest.

*

Shion finished setting up his and Nezumi’s apartment, had everything out of boxes by ten at night. He’d done it alone, not having told Safu that morning that he’d cancelled his class to pick up the keys from the landlord, not having picked up the phone any of the four times that day she’d called him, though he had texted her after she texted him that even Karan was worried.

            _I’m fine. Moving into the new apartment. Tell my mom I’m fine too. Talk to you later._

He was glad she hadn’t shown up at the new apartment. Wanted to be alone – but that wasn’t true, that wasn’t what he wanted.

            After they’d gotten approved for the apartment, Shion had daydreamed about unpacking his and Nezumi’s belongings into it. He’d fantasized about standing beside Nezumi in the kitchen, taking the plates out of their boxes and stacking them in the shelves, doing the same with the mugs and cups and silverware and pots and pans and bowls and spatulas and mixing spoons and everything else that went into kitchen cabinets.

            In the weeks before today, Shion had thought about standing in the different rooms of their new apartment with Nezumi and deciding where they might put the bookcase from Shion’s childhood bedroom, where they might put the bookcase from Nezumi’s apartment, where they might put the bed, where they might put the sofa when they bought one, where they might put the dresser. He’d imagined dividing the shelves in the bathroom cabinet with Nezumi, where they’d put their razors and shaving cream and toothpaste and toothbrushes and floss. How’d they’d arrange the bathmats and who’d put up the shower curtain while the other stocked the bottom cabinet with rolls of toilet paper.

            He’d dreamed about vacuuming while Nezumi wiped down counters, and he’d dreamed also about pointing at walls where they might hang décor they hadn’t yet bought while Nezumi leaned against him, exhausted and sweaty and not wanting to do any more while Shion would want to get it all unpacked in one night. He’d mused over whether they’d get Chinese take-out or pizza as a late lunch that only Nezumi would eat, of course, but they’d both take a break to recharge, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of their new living room before hauling themselves up again to unpack the clothes into the dresser and closet and books into the bookshelves. He’d wondered if Nezumi would insist on organizing their books by the Dewey decimal system, or by author, or by genre, or by date of publication, or by page number, or by color. Or even by how much Nezumi loved to read them, putting his favorites all on the second-to-top shelf so they were most easily plucked free by their spines to read again.

            He’d contemplated whether Nezumi would be grumpy, would hate the chore of unpacking and do so with complaint, or if he’d be cheerful, if he’d feel light and bursting the way Shion had imagined he himself would feel, unpacking beside him. Shion had decided that after a few hours or so of serious unpacking, when they’d gotten most of the work done, he’d put on a playlist that he’d made on his phone of songs he thought were most likely to prompt Nezumi to pull him by the hand into his chest, were mostly likely to make Nezumi want to dance with him, close to his body and then far apart, both jumping around their empty boxes and the splayed packing paper and bubble wrap, and then close together again, their skin sliding when they touched from the sweat they’d have built up despite the cool November air that streamed through the windows they would have opened.

            None of this happened. Shion didn’t order food because there was no human with him to order food for. He didn’t put on the playlist he’d carefully crafted because there was no one to pull him into a dance. He didn’t argue over what shelves in the bathroom he wanted because there was no one to argue with.

            He made all of the decisions regarding his and Nezumi’s apartment on his own. Except for the books – they were left in their boxes. Shion would wait for Nezumi to come home, to organize those himself.

*

There were signs telling Nezumi were he was, but he didn’t look at them.

            He found another hotel at midnight and knew this time, he’d fall right asleep. He’d walked all day and was exhausted, had stopped only once to grab a sandwich from the ready-made section of a grocery store.

            He was aimless, and this wasn’t good. He needed a goal. He’d had a goal when he was seven years old, and that had been to survive, to get to Tokyo and get a job and make money and find somewhere to live.

            But Nezumi didn’t have such goals now. It was a simple thing, he’d realized, to survive. He had money now, so he could have shelter and food without trying. The money would run out at some point, seeing as he was no longer working, but Nezumi wasn’t concerned. He could get a job easily. There were jobs all around him. He could work at the grocery store where he’d got his sandwich. He could work at a restaurant. He could work at a coffee shop, or an ice cream shop, or a bicycle store, or an aquarium, or a gas station, or a bookstore, or a mattress shop. He could work anywhere, he could always have money, he could always survive.

            That had never been the hard part, for Nezumi. He’d always survived, it was so damn easy to do it, he didn’t know why the people in his life couldn’t just do it like he could, just stay alive like he could, why was it so easy for Nezumi when it seemed so hard for everyone else?

            It was too easy, to be alive. It was the rest of it that was hard. Knowing what to do with himself, now that he was alive again when another person had died.

            He wondered if it’d always be that way. If his whole life, he’d always outlive the people he wanted to survive with. To live was supposed to be a good thing. To survive was supposed to be a mark of success, was supposed to be the point, the goal, the best thing in the world.

            He wasn’t supposed to want more. There wasn’t supposed to be anything more to want.

*

Shion had fantasized also that their first night together in their new apartment, they’d have sex everywhere.

            Nezumi would lift Shion to sit on the kitchen counter beside the stovetop, and he’d drop to his knees between Shion’s legs and complain about how the kitchen tile was too hard to kneel on for long enough to give a proper blow job, but he’d do it anyway.

            Shion would give Nezumi a blow job in return in the living room, Nezumi sitting with his back against the bookshelf, spine against the spines of the books he’d only just organized, and Shion would lie on his stomach on the carpet they’d just vacuumed, propping himself up on his elbows so that his elbows would get carpet-burn by the end of it, be rubbed raw, and Nezumi would have to kiss them to take away the hurt, then kiss Shion hard on the lips because to kiss his elbows wouldn’t do a damn thing.

            They’d kiss still, as they stumbled into the hallway, hands scraping the clothes off each other and also trailing along the walls because they’d get lost easily, they wouldn’t be familiar with this new apartment, they’d have to fumble around to find the doorway of the bathroom because they’d refuse to take their eyes off each other.

            And in the bathroom they’d lie in the tub, squished into an awkward sixty-nine with their elbows and knees getting bruised from the porcelain, and Nezumi cursing when the back of his head hit the rim of the tub, and Shion laughing when his face got stuck between Nezumi’s muscular thighs, and the both of them trying to get up at the same time and pulling on the shower curtain they’d just put up to regain their balance and then worrying they’d put stress on the curtain rod, checking to make sure it was still securely in place between the walls before leaving the bathroom.

            They’d go next to the linen closet, which was filled with shelves and the washer/dryer combination unit, and there was nowhere inside of it for them to fit and have sex, so they’d just kiss, Shion with his back against the shelves so each one dug into a different vertebrate along his spine, while the circular door of the washer/dryer pressed flush against the backs of his calves until he jumped up and wrapped his legs around Nezumi’s waist.

            And Nezumi would carry him into the bedroom, their bedroom, and he’d take Shion not to the bed but to the window, and that’s where Nezumi would fuck him, finally, Shion’s back against the window, the cool of the glass soothing and smoothing the indents imprinted into Shion’s skin by the shelves of the linen closet.

            But Nezumi would get tired of carrying Shion’s weight, so before either of them climaxed, he’d carry Shion away from the window and to the bigger closet, which was a tiny sort of walk-in, where you could walk in but then you could only stand there, with nowhere to walk around.

            Nezumi would walk in but realize he couldn’t do anything else but stand there, still carrying Shion, who wouldn’t have taken his legs from around Nezumi’s waist because Nezumi was still inside of him, and Shion wouldn’t want to lose the feeling of him even for a second.

            So Nezumi would back out of the closet, still avoiding the bed for reasons Shion would only wonder at but not ask because his lips were too busy to form words, kissing Nezumi’s neck and jaw and shoulders and collarbone and the top of his chest and his cheeks and forehead and earlobes too.

            Nezumi would drop to his knees in front of the closet, would lay Shion down on the floor, and in the process he’d come out of Shion, and Shion would protest, disgruntled, and Nezumi would laugh at him with that laugh of his, a laugh Shion would die for a thousand times and a thousand times more. And then Nezumi would enter him again, this time with Shion lying on the floor so that his head and neck and the tops of his shoulders were the only parts of his body in the closet, and when he looked up, he would see the bottoms of the clothes they’d hung on hangers just an hour before, the opposite of a bird’s-eye view.

            Nezumi would fuck him slowly and then faster and then slowly again, and Shion would not see the clothes on their hangers anymore because Nezumi would be lying over him, and Shion would only see his face, his long hair trailing down, curtaining them both until Nezumi would duck down, hide his expression in Shion’s shoulder, but he wouldn’t be able to hide his voice, and Shion would hear the whisper of his own name. He’d be staring back up at the clothes on their hangers, and he would climax first, and then Nezumi would a few minutes later, after dragging Shion’s name out in that breathless voice of his several times more.

            They’d lie there on the floor of their bedroom, heads in the closet but the rest of their bodies not, and they’d breathe and try not to fall asleep because they were supposed to sleep their first night on their bed that they’d made together, Nezumi insisting that the fitted sheet was too small and threatening to throw it out the window until Shion calmed him down and told him to take a break and let him make the bed himself, but Nezumi wouldn’t let him do that, would rather complain and make the bed with Shion than let Shion do it without him.

            “Why didn’t you just fuck me on the bed?” Shion would ask, sometime after he’d caught his breath, after his body had stopped pulsing, after he’d fallen asleep for maybe a minute or two before waking again and remembering he didn’t want to fall asleep on the floor.

            “That’s your old mattress, with your old sheets,” Nezumi would say, but his eyes would still be closed, and his bangs would be halfway over them, clumps of hair stuck together from the wet of his sweat. “We’ve fucked on it before.”

            He’d say it like the logic of it made sense, and to Shion, it would. They had fucked on that mattress before many times, and today was a day of new things, of their new apartment, of their new home, of their new futures, of their new lives.

*

After leaving the second hotel, after his second night out of Tokyo, after Shion had been dead for one full day and two full nights, Nezumi did not keep walking.

            He got on a bus. He had somewhere he wanted to go. Maybe _wanted_ was the wrong word. Nezumi didn’t trust himself to want, didn’t think it wise to want anymore.

            He had somewhere he thought maybe now it was about time to go. So he went.

*

Shion spent the first night in his and Nezumi’s new apartment alone and woke his first morning there alone too.

            It was the second day of November, a Friday, and Shion had class again. He could cancel it as he had the day before, stay in bed until Nezumi returned to him, but instead, he pushed himself off his mattress.

            He got ready for his class, showered in the new shower and dressed in his clothes hung in the new closet and made breakfast in the new kitchen with the new stoves, that weren’t actually new, but they were new to him. He learned that the stove in the back-left corner did not turn on without a lit match held to the gas burner, but the others turned on just fine.

            He made pancakes before remembering he could not eat them, and there was no human in his apartment who would eat them – there was no Nezumi in their apartment who would eat them.

            Shion stared at the pancake in the pan. It was the perfect golden. Nezumi liked his pancakes a little burnt, so Shion did not take the pancake out of the pan. He let it sit there. He watched it and kept watching it as smoke began to rise up the sides of it. More smoke rose, and Shion flipped it over so he could look at the blackened side while the other side began to smoke as well.

            Shion left the pancake on the stove even still. The smoke alarms went off, and this was a good thing, it was important to know those worked because even though Shion couldn’t get burned, Nezumi would be in danger if their smoke alarms were ineffective. A burning pancake was as good a test as any. Shion was keeping Nezumi safe by burning these pancakes, but Nezumi wasn’t even in the goddamn apartment, and the smoke alarm kept ringing, and Shion couldn’t stand the sound of it after a full minute.

            He climbed onto the kitchen counter and put his hand around the plastic of the circular smoke alarm and ripped the entire thing out of the ceiling. It kept ringing, so he ripped at the wires too that stuck out, bare and exposed, from the hole in the ceiling, and then it finally shut up.

            Shion climbed back down. The pancake was still burning, but it didn’t matter, because there was no one to eat it, and there was no smoke alarm to go off, and if a fire began, there was no one to die in the flames.

*

Nezumi stood in front of the wall of stone. It was marble and glossy and a dark grey just a few shades from black.

            Carved into it were names, thousands of names, some Nezumi did not know but some that he did, a lot that he did, more that he did than anyone else in the world, probably.

            The trip had taken seven hours, and it was afternoon, the sun already setting behind Nezumi’s shoulders where he couldn’t see it falling. He could only see the wall of stone, and the names on it, and the faces that belonged to those names, but of course the faces were only in his head and not actually in front of him.

            It was a tourist attraction, and behind him, Nezumi heard voices, people saying – _Oh, look, that’s it, right there were that man is standing._ Others saying – _Let’s wait for him to move, then hurry and stand next to it before someone else does so we can get a good picture and then go get dinner, I’m starving._ Others saying – _It’s smaller than I thought it’d be, what about you? Weren’t there thousands? How do all those names fit on that?_

            Nezumi stood a foot in front of the wall, so he could only see a portion of it, but really, it spanned wider than his arms would if he stretched them out. It was maybe ten feet wide, and taller than him too, but only by about a foot.

            It was neither bigger nor smaller than Nezumi had thought it would be because he hadn’t even known it existed. He wondered why he hadn’t known this. Clearly, it was a tourist attraction. Clearly, it was some kind of famous plaque, some kind of memorial that people visited Kyoto to look at, to take pictures of, to read the names off of, names they wouldn’t know, names they wouldn’t recognize the way Nezumi did.

            Above the columns of names were words carved in larger letters than the names were.

_Lives of the Gin Dynasty, Taken by Vampires on 13-6-1997:_

_You Will Be Missed and You Will Be Remembered and You Will Be Honored_

            Nezumi wondered who was meant to be missing these lives. Who was meant to be remembering them and honoring them.

            Was it just him? Was the responsibility of it all on him? He was the only one who could remember them. He was the only one who knew how to miss them in the way they deserved to be missed, for the things worth missing about them – the way his sister crinkled her nose when she laughed, the way his father sprinkled cocoa powder in his milk, the way his mother opened every window in the house the moment she woke up so that the sun would feel welcome to join them for breakfast.

            Nezumi didn’t just have a mother and father and sister. He had an aunt who could have been twins with his mother, but she was a year older and taught Nezumi how carve bears into the wood of fallen tree branches.

            He had a grandfather with a raspy voice that used to scare Nezumi when he was very young until his grandfather read to him, turned his voice into characters and woodland creatures and beasts and heroes.

            He had cousins, one who taught him how to recognize the calls of different birds, another who babysat Nezumi and his sister when his parents went out dancing, another who taught Nezumi how to curse, and another to whom Nezumi passed on his new cursing expertise.

            He had an uncle who slept drunk on their couch once, and another uncle who found coins behind Nezumi’s ears, and another aunt who showed Nezumi how to do a cartwheel, and a grandmother who called Nezumi by his father’s name not because she couldn’t remember his own but because she insisted his father looked exactly like him as a child, and this had made Nezumi’s small chest swell with pride.

            He had neighbors with a pet dog named Kenta that they let Nezumi play with, and there was the woman in the grocery store who gave Nezumi free squares of mint chocolate, and there was the old couple from down the street who always took early-morning walks, passing by the sidewalk outside Nezumi’s window so he could watch them from his bed and wonder if he’d ever be as old as that, if he’d ever hold hands with anyone as old as that, and he’d wonder what a hand that old would feel like, soft as clouds like his grandparents’ hands, probably, and he’d rub his own palms and be uncertain that his own skin would ever feel that way.

            On the wall in front of him was a life Nezumi had forgotten he’d ever had. He’d made himself forget it. He hadn’t ever let himself miss it or remember it or honor it.

            He raised his hand now, touched his fingers to one of the names he’d searched for and found, in the third column near the top, just at his eye level. The carved marble was cool against his fingertips.

            He whispered the name beneath his fingers, but he’d never used that name anyway, so then he whispered, _“Mom.”_

            There was no magic. The wind did not pick up, and cherry blossoms did not toss themselves around his cheeks, and his mother did not appear in front of him, pushing her braid over her shoulder to her back so it wouldn’t get in the way when she crouched down and hugged him – though of course, she would not have to crouch down anymore. Maybe Nezumi was taller than her now. He couldn’t remember her height. She’d just been an adult, and they’d all been the same height – the height of adults, tall and nothing more specific than that.

            Nezumi pressed his palm flat to the memorial so that it covered the names of his mother and father and sister, which had been carved together, one below the other in the third column of the memorial. There was another name too, below his mother’s and above his sister’s. It was Nezumi’s own name, the one his parents had given him, the one he’d been called before everyone had died, before he’d chosen a different name, a name no one had ever called him before, one that wouldn’t be attached to the voices and the memories of these people who’d used his old name – other than his grandmother, of course, who’d called him by his father’s name.

           After everyone had died, Nezumi hadn’t wanted the name that had been used to tuck him in at night, to tell him he was loved, to yell at him over chores he hadn’t done, to scold him for fighting his sister, to plead with him to have the last pancake, to ask him what book he wanted to read before bed, to call out to him at nights when he was outside exploring, to tell him now it was time to come home.

            According to this memorial and this name carved into it, Nezumi was dead, had been killed by vamps, was being missed and remembered and honored by someone, anyone, maybe all of Japan, maybe all of the world because some of the tourists behind him were speaking in languages he did not understand.

            Nezumi wondered who’d carved this stone. Who’d known how to group the families like this, so that Nezumi’s grandmother and grandfather weren’t far away from his own name, and his aunts and uncles, and his cousins too. Nezumi wondered who’d known all of this, everything about his past, but yet had not known that Nezumi himself was not dead, that Nezumi himself could not die, would live forever, it seemed, no matter how many names he knew were carved into stones.

            “Excuse me, sir, others would like their turns as well.”

            Nezumi turned, startled, his hand slipping from his old name on the wall and sliding to cover others, names that maybe he knew but maybe he didn’t, there were so many, and Nezumi had not known as a child that it would be up to him to remember all of them and miss all of them and honor all of them.

            The woman standing beside him covered her mouth with her palm, her eyes widening.

            “Sorry,” Nezumi told her. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing in front of this wall. Long enough to stop hearing the voices behind him, to forget that people were waiting, tourists had come all this way to take pictures of names they didn’t know.

            He took his hand from the wall just as the woman – a young woman, around his own age – took her hand from her mouth.

            “I’m so – So sorry – I didn’t realize you were – Please, take your time – I’m such an idiot, I’m so sorry, shit, I’m sorry, I had no idea – ”

            Nezumi was already backing away from the memorial. It sat on the edge of the woods, by the trail that would have led to his own home, and the homes of everyone else on this memorial too.

            “It’s okay,” Nezumi told her, walking farther back from her, then turning away from her stammers with a wave he hoped was friendly and warm and would make her stop throwing her apologies at his back.

            “I’m really sorry!” she called, not convinced by his wave, clearly.

            The frantic apologies had drawn attention, or maybe Nezumi had already drawn attention by standing so long in front of the memorial, and the tourists watched him as Nezumi walked around them, trying not to look long enough at any of them to see their expressions or let them see his own.

            As he walked away from them, he wondered if any of them had noticed where he’d placed his hand. If they’d look at the same spot, see the name he used to be called, and somehow know it was him, realize his name on that plaque was a mistake because he was alive, realize his name was a lie and no one was supposed to waste their time honoring him, or remembering him, or missing him.

*


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone for waiting so long for the update! i've been super busy the past few weeks, but everything has calmed down and updates should be more or less regular again! if you're still with me, i hope the new chap was worth the wait, and thanks as always for reading! :D

The first two weeks at his and Nezumi’s new apartment, Shion did not spend much time in it.

            He worked in the bakery, telling Karan not to bother calling contractors, that he would take care of the fire damage himself. He bought the tools and researched how to replace ovens and stoves and sinks and where to buy new appliances online and how to fix the wirings that’d been burnt and how to build counters and cabinets and how to seal slabs of marble on top of these cabinets.

            He went to school when he had class and otherwise spent his time fixing what he had broken. He took longer than a contractor would have, but he refused to do a worse job, spent most nights awake watching DIY YouTube videos and reading DIY books from the library. He did this in the front room of the bakery, which he himself had scrubbed clean of blood, just as he himself had found new tables and chairs, he himself had fixed the glass display counter, he himself had filled the bullet holes in the walls with plaster and repainted them.

            Neither law enforcement nor the government had said anything on the deaths of Momoe and the four Vamp Hunters, not to the public and not even to Karan despite the fact that it’d all happened in her bakery. Shion didn’t know what this meant. Clearly, he was a danger. He’d murdered five people in gory, gruesome ways. Shouldn’t he be punished? How could there be death and no repercussions?

            He worked in the bakery and waited for the police to collect him, to take him away, or for more Vamp Hunters to come. He thought about giving himself up, wanted someone to do something to him, to tell him he was wrong, he’d hurt people and taken lives and ruined the lives he hadn’t taken. He was a monster, not because he was a vamp but because of his own decisions and his own actions and his own wants.

            After two weeks, in the exact middle of November, the fifteenth, Nezumi had not returned, and Shion finished fixing everything in the bakery that’d been broken. It was not as good as new, but it was nearly so.

            Shion felt no satisfaction. He did not go home to rest even though he’d been working since four in the morning, and it was five in the afternoon. He went to the theater, walked instead of taking the subway, and by the time he got there it was close to six. It was a Thursday, so Shion should have remembered that the cast would be rehearsing, but he hadn’t remembered, he hadn’t thought about it at all, that people could function normally in the same sort of routine they’d had before Nezumi had disappeared.

           He let himself into the theater and saw Nezumi’s castmates on stage and his manager sitting in the audience shouting at them. He was demanding to know why they’d stopped in the middle of a scene until one girl pointed at Shion standing in front of the back doors of the theater.

           Nezumi’s manager turned around in his seat, then stood up, cupped his hand over his eyes like there was sunlight in them when the theater was not even fully lighted.

           “You got some excuse for why your boyfriend can’t be bothered to grace us with his presence?” the manager called out.

           Shion had never spoken to Nezumi’s manager before, but to be yelled at once, when he’d come to talk to Nezumi while Nezumi was working after some fight they’d had, Shion couldn’t even remember it.

           The manager’s name was Kage, Shion remembered. He walked farther into the theater, stood halfway down the rows of seats. Kage stood in front of a middle seat three rows ahead of him.

           “I don’t know where he is,” Shion said. He’d meant to speak loudly because the theater was loud and Kage was three rows away and Shion wanted to be heard, but he’d only whispered.

           Kage dropped his hand from over his eyes.

           “He hasn’t been home in two weeks. He’s disappeared, and I thought – I thought maybe someone here might know,” Shion offered. He hadn’t thought this. He doubted anyone here knew where Nezumi was, but Shion hadn’t been to the theater in two weeks, and he missed it – not nearly as much as he missed the man he came here for, but he missed it all the same.

           It reminded him of Nezumi. Not that that meant much. Everything reminded him of Nezumi.

            Shion waited for Kage to throw him out of the theater, but instead, the manager turned around, faced his cast again.

            “No one leaves this theater until they talk to Shion. I’ll call you into my office when he’s ready for you. Rehearse in the meantime, the dialogue’s flat in scene three,” Kage shouted, then walked out from the third row, curled two of his fingers at Shion in a gesture for Shion to follow him.

            Shion followed Kage backstage, into a room he hadn’t been in before. He hadn’t known Kage knew his name. It also surprised him that Kage had referred to him as Nezumi’s boyfriend. He wondered if Nezumi had talked about him and found the idea of that extremely unlikely, but Shion couldn’t think of any other way Kage could have known who he was.

            Kage gestured for Shion to sit in the chair behind the desk in what Shion had gathered was his office. Shion sat, and Kage sat across the desk in front of him.

            “When’s the last you heard from him?” Kage asked.

            Shion pressed his palms into his knees. “Two weeks ago. Halloween night.”

            “He won’t answer his phone,” Kage said. A statement, not a question, but he didn’t need to ask. Shion knew Kage had been calling Nezumi, texting him.

            “I have his phone. He left it.”

            Kage sighed, rubbed his temples briefly. “He’s skipped rehearsals and shows before, but not like this, for so long without a word. I didn’t want to think anything had happened to him. Should I start thinking something happened to him?”

           Shion glanced down at Kage’s desk. It was littered with script books and other books, too, the kinds that Nezumi liked to read, classic literature. Shion wondered vaguely if Nezumi’s taste in books had been influenced by this Kage that he always claimed to be annoyed with.

           Shion had suspected for some time that despite Nezumi’s complaints, Kage was the closest thing to a family Nezumi had after he lost his own. His manager had taken him in when he was a teenager, had put up with Nezumi despite the man’s obstinacy and attitude, both traits of Nezumi’s that Shion knew well but Kage was likely even more acquainted with.

           “I didn’t think he’d really gone. I didn’t believe it, but it’s been two weeks, how can I not believe it anymore? I don’t know how to find him, I don’t know what to do,” Shion admitted, his voice rising, and he didn’t try to stop it. He wanted someone else to share his worry. He wanted someone else to feel as empty as he did, as confused and frustrated and hurt and pissed off.

           Kage looked at Shion for a long moment, then stood, went to the door. “I’ll send each of the cast and crew in one at a time so you can talk to them, see if they can help, though I doubt anyone knows anything. Nezumi kept to himself.”

            Shion dug his fingers into his knees. “I know.”

            Kage opened the door, hesitated and glanced back. “Wherever he is, he can take care of himself. He’s always been able to do that.”

            Shion nodded once, his throat tightening, and Kage left.      

            As Shion talked to each of Nezumi’s coworkers, he heard again and again that no one had heard anything from Nezumi. Most of the cast and crew insisted that if anyone knew something, it would be a light crew guy named Shunsuke.

            The name was familiar in a way Shion could not quite place, but finally a man walked into the manager’s office and said, as he closed the door behind him, “Hey, I’m Shunsuke. Lights crew.”

            He was tall as Nezumi and handsome in a way that bothered Shion, a handsomeness that felt unnecessary for anyone but celebrities, and it wasn’t even like Shunsuke was an actor. He was on lights crew, that was what everyone had told Shion, that was what he himself had told Shion, so there was no reason for him to look this way.

            Shunsuke sat in the chair across the manager’s desk from Shion and leaned his elbows on his knees, looked even more handsome sitting down than he had standing up. Shion forgot the set of questions he’d been asking the rest of the cast and crew.

            “Who are you?” Shion demanded.

            Shunsuke blinked. “Shunsuke,” he repeated. “I do lights.”

            “Everyone so far said if anyone knew anything, it’d be you,” Shion told him. He realized that until this moment he’d never felt jealousy in his life, other than towards humans simply for being human, but it’d never been anything more personal than that, more tangible than that.

            Shunsuke laughed lightly. “Well, that’s certainly not true. He never was a big talker, especially not to me.”

            Shion knew that Nezumi had slept on and off with someone at the theater for many years. He’d never asked the name, had always assumed it was someone in the cast, had not thought it might be someone on light crew with an airy laugh like this Shunsuke had, who was as handsome as this Shunsuke was – not that Shion should have been surprised. Nezumi would attract other handsome men. That was to be expected, if anything.

            “I guess he told you about me,” Shunsuke said, almost hesitantly, after Shion said nothing.

            “I just want to know where he is,” Shion said, keeping his voice even. He decided he would pretend he didn’t care that Nezumi had slept with this man because this was the truth – he didn’t care that Nezumi had slept with this man. That had nothing to do with anything that was important or mattered at all.

            To Shion’s relief, Shunsuke didn’t laugh again. He shook his head, leaned forward even more. “I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did. I don’t know what anyone said to you, but Nezumi and I didn’t have anything like what you guys do going on, we’re not secretly in love, it’s nothing like that, never been. I have nothing against you, and I really doubt Nezumi even considers me a friend. I didn’t even know he was missing, honestly I figured you guys eloped or something and were honeymooning, and Nezumi felt no obligation to call in to work to let us know he wouldn’t be showing up to his shows because the manager lets him get away with anything.”

            “Honeymooning?” Shion asked, distracted by his own worry and the jealousy he didn’t even feel and startled by the word, the idea of it, connected to Nezumi. He couldn’t picture Nezumi, lying out on a beach, sunscreen rubbed halfheartedly over his face so that a streak of it striped white over his nose. He couldn’t imagine Nezumi’s body rocking rhythmically over his own on a bed with white sheets and a gossamer canopy, sea-salted air slipping through the open window to tug his bangs across his eyes, to hide the flutter of them right at the moment he climaxed.

            Shunsuke shrugged. “I don’t know. Why not?”

            “He’s not honeymooning.”

            “Well, clearly, or you wouldn’t be here interrogating us in the manager’s office,” Shunsuke replied, not quite hostile but close enough, but then he sighed, leaned back, rubbed his hand over his face. “I’m sorry. I’m not like that, some kind of insensitive asshole, I don’t want you to think that. Not that it matters what you think of me – That’s just it, it’s weird talking to you, that’s all. You’re making me nervous.”

            “Nervous,” Shion said, turning the word over in his mouth. The numbness he’d felt since Nezumi had been gone was offset by this Shunsuke, this man Shion couldn’t figure out, couldn’t imagine sleeping with Nezumi.

            He knew better than to try to imagine it. What they might have talked about, if they’d talked at all, or if they’d just had silent sex, not completely silent as there’d probably been the usual sounds of sex, moans and apologies and hard breathing and questions about speed and pressure and position.

            Shunsuke ran his hand back and forth through his hair. “Yeah, nervous,” he confirmed, almost under his breath. “But hey, listen, really, I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he’d go, maybe the library, but you can’t really spend two weeks hiding out in a library. Or maybe he can, I don’t know. Really, the only things I know that guy likes are acting and books and sex. And you,” Shunsuke added quickly, seeming flustered for saying _sex._

            Shion didn’t bother replying. He didn’t know what he was doing, talking to everyone Nezumi worked with, talking to this man Nezumi had slept with. None of it would make a difference. None of it would make Nezumi appear again, and Shion knew that fully.

            It was just something to do, he supposed. Now that the bakery renovations were finished, he just needed something to do so he wouldn’t have to think for even a second about the possibility that Nezumi might be gone forever.

            Shunsuke looked at Shion for another full minute, then stood up, gave an awkward gesture that might have been a wave. “It was good to meet you, anyway. All the cast was curious about you, especially since we found out he was moving in with you. It’s not really a Nezumi thing to do, live with someone else. Settle down. Do the commitment thing, the family thing. We all couldn’t believe it.”

            Shion stood up too. He didn’t have to talk to anyone else in the cast. It’d be the same thing over and over again. It’d be a waste of time, and even though Shion had time to waste, he didn’t want to do so here, he didn’t want to do it listening to everyone tell him that if anyone knew anything, it’d be this Shunsuke, this light crew guy that Nezumi used to sleep with, probably for years when Shion hadn’t even known the man for a full year.

            No, it was about a full year now. Mid-November. If Shion thought back, that was around the same time he’d first spoken to Nezumi outside his lecture hall.

            “Maybe he couldn’t believe it either,” Shunsuke was saying, almost to himself, and Shion had no idea what he was talking about before he remembered Shunsuke had just been talking about how strange it was for Nezumi to settle down.

           Shion did not bother correcting Shunsuke, telling this man that the reason Nezumi had left had nothing to do with being unable to believe he could settle down. Shion did not bother explaining that the reason Nezumi had disappeared was because he thought Shion was dead, was because he was putting distance between himself and his loss, turning his back on what might hurt him.

            It was useless to explain this, and Shion wasn’t entirely sure if he believed it anyway. Maybe it was Shunsuke that was right – after all, even if they hadn’t been sleeping together the whole time, the man had still known Nezumi for years, so much longer than Shion had.

            Maybe Nezumi had left simply because the alternative was to stay, was to settle down, was an apartment that they would live in together and a life that they would share completely.

            Maybe it wasn’t that Nezumi really thought Shion was dead. Maybe it was the possibility that Shion was still alive that Nezumi had run from.

*

Shion had been dead for two weeks, and Nezumi had stayed in Kyoto. He lived in a hotel, but to do so was depleting his savings at a significant rate. He did not have a job.

            Nezumi spent his days reading, mostly, books he borrowed from the Kyoto library. He’d flirted with the librarian in order to get a library card even though he didn’t have proof of a permanent address in the city.

            Most days, even if he was in the middle of a particularly good book, Nezumi took a break from it and went to the Gin Dynasty memorial. Sometimes he stayed back, looked at it from afar and watched tourists take pictures of it and rub their fingers along the carved names. Other days, Nezumi was the one reading the carvings, standing close and trying to learn the names of everyone in his dynasty he hadn’t known so that he might be able to honor them and remember them and miss them along with the names he did know.

            Twice, Nezumi had taken the tour of his burnt village. The first time, he knew he made the tour guide nervous, and a speech that had probably been casual and easy became something the tour guide stumbled through, with quick glances at Nezumi several times a minute. The people in the group, too, seemed nervous with Nezumi among them. Only the young children seemed unfazed, running around the tall grass the way Nezumi used to until their parents called them back to their sides, chastised them with hissed reminders that this was a sacred place, a solemn place, not a place of play.

            Nezumi wanted to tell these parents that this place deserved life in it, deserved to be played in and house laughter, but he kept silent, shaking his head when the tour guide asked if he’d like to add anything the tour guide might have missed.

            The second time he went on a tour, Nezumi wore dark-lensed sunglasses and made sure to have a different tour guide, and with his eyes hidden he was not recognized as a Gin Dynasty survivor. The tour went smoothly, children running and laughing without getting chastised and the tour guide herself even offering a well-rehearsed and tasteful joke or two, even flirting with Nezumi, who let himself flirt back just to be sure he remembered how to do it. It was a useful tool, to flirt to get what he wanted, even though during the tour, Nezumi didn’t want anything but to know what other people knew about his dynasty.

            He himself learned several things on these tours that he hadn’t known before, like the exact population number, and that his dynasty had been one of the oldest still left in Japan before it’d been eradicated, and that they were one of the only Japanese dynasties where women were the heads of the households rather than the men.

            Nezumi had not realized this, living in the dynasty. He hadn’t thought there was a head of his household. His mother and father had both seemed equal. Even so, Nezumi didn’t object because the tour guide seemed so knowledgeable and certain, whereas Nezumi had only been a child when he’d been able to witness the habits of his dynasty, and he’d spent most of his life afterward trying to forget the indistinct memories he’d made.

            Nezumi was told also on the tour that there had been no survivors of the Gin Dynasty after the Great Slaughter. He did not object to this either. He wondered why his previous tour guide hadn’t spoken to her colleagues about his presence on her tour. Maybe his second tour guide was new, not friends with the previous tour guide.

            While Nezumi was wondering this and not objecting, someone else on the tour objected for him. A woman insisted her sister’s therapist’s husband had seen a Gin Dynasty survivor once in a bakery in Tokyo. The other members on the tour looked doubtful. The tour guide frowned in disappointment at the woman, as if to spread such lies in this sacred place was distasteful. Nezumi didn’t defend the woman, didn’t whip off his sunglasses in a dramatic moment to expose her as truthful. He was selfish and wanted to see the end of the tour as it was meant for strangers.

            Nezumi planned to go on more tours, woke up two weeks after he left Tokyo with this plan in mind. But this plan changed when he got out of bed and looked at the date on the calendar on his hotel nightstand.

           It was the middle of the month, November fifteenth. His rent for the new apartment in Tokyo was due at the end of the month. He had signed the lease for the apartment. He was the sole person responsible – especially now, seeing as Shion was dead.

            Nezumi did not want this apartment in Tokyo that was bigger than enough for two people, let alone one. He hadn’t made any arrangements to cancel the lease and wondered if today, the middle of the first month of his lease, was a good day to do that.

            Whether or not he canceled that lease, he realized it was probably about time to get a lease on a new apartment. An apartment for just one person. An apartment that was not in Tokyo, where Nezumi never planned on returning, but Kyoto, where Nezumi could visit his family’s memorial whenever he wanted, where he could go on tours in disguise and learn over and over the facts of his dynasty while he walked on the same grass he used to run on as a child.

            It was less painful to be back in Kyoto than Nezumi might have expected, if he’d ever bothered to think about returning before he actually had. Very little was the same, was recognizable in any way, and what Nezumi did recognize, he did so with detachment rather than any painful clutch of his chest. It felt more as if he’d come across some place he’d only ever dreamt about rather than returned to a place he’d lived. It seemed to him that Kyoto did not belong to Nezumi, nor Nezumi to Kyoto, and this suited him just fine.

           This was why he wanted to stay. It was best to be somewhere based in memory, rooted in the past. Somewhere Nezumi hardly ever felt present, somewhere Nezumi never had to think about the future, somewhere he could forget all the things he used to have that had been taken from him, just as he should have known to expect.

*

Shion knew how to get Nezumi back. He’d known all along, since Halloween night when Nezumi disappeared and he’d stood in the hospital lobby with Safu, waiting for Nezumi to appear as the front desk lady made announcements requesting him over the loudspeaker.

            Nezumi was gone only because he thought Shion was dead, only because Momoe had done something terrible to him, messed with his head and made him think it was only natural for those he loved to die on him, to leave him alone. But it was easy enough, Shion knew, to let Nezumi know he was not dead.

            All Shion had to do was take off his contacts and wipe off his _Natural Sand_ foundation from his skin. It’d be in the news immediately that a vamp was again loose in Tokyo. The world would hear of it, which meant Nezumi, wherever he’d gone, wherever he was, would hear of it too.

            Shion had put this plan out of his mind. He’d thought Nezumi would come back on his own. He’d been certain whatever damage Momoe had done to him would wear off, whatever trance she’d put him in would fade away, that he would come back to himself, and the Nezumi Shion knew would never accept his death without proof, would never run from that he was scared of, would never leave him waiting.

           But Nezumi didn’t come back, and now it was over three weeks into November, which meant in a few days, Nezumi would be gone a month. So Shion thought again about the way he knew he could get Nezumi back, and this time, he didn’t put it out of his mind. This time, he spoke it aloud.

           “I know how to get him back.”

           “You just know someone is going to say penis,” Safu said. “I think they make sure each of the questions can be answered by penis. It’s clearly some sort of American obsession.”

           They were in Shion and Nezumi’s apartment, which was still Shion and Nezumi’s apartment even though Nezumi had never stepped foot in it after the landlord gave them the pre-signing tour. At the moment, Shion was writing out the check for the next month’s rent. Safu was beside him on the couch, watching that American show, _Family Feud._ Shion didn’t have cable, and one of the few channels he had seemed to only broadcast American game shows.

           “Sorry, did you say something?” Safu asked, still not turning away from the television, so Shion glanced at it.

           The question that had been asked was, _Name something women leave lipstick on._

           “He’s only gone because he thinks I’m dead,” Shion said, no longer looking at the clapping families on screen. “I just have to let him know I’m not dead, or he might never come back. Who knows what Momoe did to him. You said she altered his psychological state, what if he’s in a terrible place, thinking terrible things? What if he’s hurt himself? What if he – ”

           “Shion, you can’t start wildly speculating. Nothing good will come out of that,” Safu said sharply. She’d muted the television and turned to him.

           Shion pressed the pad of his thumb into the sharp corner of the check he was writing. “It’s been over three weeks. I keep waiting for something to change, but why should it?”

           “But there’s nothing we can do.”

           “If there’s a vamp in Tokyo on the news, he’ll hear about it wherever he is. He’ll know it’s me,” Shion said, watching Safu carefully, knowing she wouldn’t like the idea.

           Safu stared at him blankly. “That’s your plan?”

           “It’s the only – ”

           “Reveal what you are? That’s what you think will help this situation? If you expose yourself, you’ll lose your job. So will Karan. I might too, we’ll all be ostracized, they’ll try to kill you again, you’ll have to go underground, you’ll be homeless and hunted, that’s what you want?” Safu spoke calmly, and Shion would rather she yelled at him.

           If she yelled, it would give him an excuse to yell back, and he wanted to. He had too much built up inside of him, too much of what, he didn’t know, but it filled his chest and rose up his throat and nearly choked him, he’d barely been able to breathe since Nezumi had vanished.

           “I want Nezumi back,” Shion said. His jaw clenched tight enough to hurt, but he couldn’t relax, and he stood up even though he didn’t have anywhere to go.

           “It won’t do either of you any good if you let him know you’re alive only to be killed by Vamp Hunters the next day. That’s a ridiculous idea, the fact that you even thought about it is unthinkable and absurd. I won’t even bother discussing it with you a second more,” Safu said, looking away from Shion, back at the television, turning the mute button off just as the American host offered his microphone to a woman in a red jumpsuit.

           “Linda, we’re back to you. Name something a woman might leave her lipstick on.”

           The woman leaned close to the microphone and whispered, “Oh, Steve, well, you know, she just might leave lipstick on her husband’s… _trouser snake_.”

           The laughter and clapping from the screen was cut off when Safu changed the channel abruptly to a screen that was blank but for large words informing them they didn’t have that channel.

           Shion sat back down on the couch. He signed the check for his rent and stuck in into the envelop he’d already addressed and stamped.

            “I’ll give him a week,” Shion said, after sealing the envelope, while Safu continued to flip channels. “If he’s not back by then, I’ll stop wearing my contacts and foundation. I don’t care what happens afterward, as long as he knows I’m okay, as long as he knows it’s not his destiny to be abandoned, as long as he knows he doesn’t have to spend his life alone again.”

            Safu said nothing. She stared resolutely at the screen even though all it showed now was static.

*

Every apartment Nezumi attempted to lease required applicants to have some sort of employment, so Nezumi got a job. When he applied for a job as a tour guide of the Gin Dynasty’s memorial ground, he was made to undergo a level one vamp screening. Level one screenings checked for eye color, so Nezumi was exposed as the survivor of the Gin Dynasty.

            He was, of course, hired immediately, and trained by the same tour guides that had shown him around.

            After he learned the ropes, Nezumi gave tours every day. Quickly, news spread that a Gin Dynasty member had not only survived, but was offering tours of his old home, of the site of the Great Slaughter where everyone he’d known had died. Nezumi’s tours began filling up, and no one wanted tours with the other tour guides. People who were placed in other tours demanded refunds. Business suffered because Nezumi could only give so many tours to so many people a day.

            After two days of this, a new system was put in place where the only way to get a tour with Nezumi was through a raffle. People had to buy nonrefundable tickets and would be placed in groups with the other tour guides, as per the usual system. Every two hours – at the beginning of each tour – ten people would be chosen by raffle to be taken out of their assigned tour guide group and put into Nezumi’s group.

            Things worked better this way. A bodyguard was hired for Nezumi when the tour company realized people often tried to come close to him, to touch his hair or hug him, which Nezumi did not like, and the company did not want Nezumi to be made uncomfortable or put in danger. For the latter reason, level one vamp screenings were also newly required for people who wanted tours. There was worry, after all, that a vamp might find out about this sole Gin Dynasty survivor, newly in the spotlight, and try to hurt Nezumi, finish the job of eradicating the Gin Dynasty in the very same setting as they’d exterminated the rest.

            Nezumi was to be protected, and the company did not mind adding new policies to protect him. After all, the last Gin Dynasty survivor giving tours of the Gin Dynasty’s memorial grounds brought in incredible business, and soon enough, Nezumi’s tours were on national, and then international, news.

*

Shion knew that Nezumi was alive after his landlord called him and informed him that his rent check would be voided, as the rent for December had already been paid in full by Nezumi.

            The landlord had no more information, such as where Nezumi had sent his check from, but Shion soon didn’t need that information, nor did he need to expose himself as a vamp, as Nezumi was on the news.

            Shion and Safu were on the first train to Kyoto, and then they were in line to buy tickets for a tour of the Gin Dynasty’s memorial grounds. The line was winding, and as they waited, Safu read the informational packet that a tour guide – one that wasn’t Nezumi – had handed her.

            “Oh, shit,” Safu said.

            “What?” Shion was bouncing on his feet. He was full of energy, could hardly manage standing still in line, which moved sluggishly, inch by inch. He didn’t bother craning his neck searching for Nezumi. There were ropes stretched out from the ticket booth around the perimeter of the memorial grounds to stop anyone from getting into Gin Dynasty territory without a ticket, and there were guards that stood every few feet along the ropes to stop those with added dedication.

            This was all for Nezumi’s safety, Safu had already read from the pamphlet, so people who weren’t on tours couldn’t run around the area trying to accost Nezumi. After all, Nezumi was the reason everyone was here. Not to see the old remains of the site of the Great Slaughter, the most gruesome vamp massacre in international history, but to see the one man who’d survived it.

            At the moment, Nezumi was on a tour, deep in Gin Dynasty territory. The train from Tokyo had taken three hours, so it was half past noon. The tours were given every two hours, and the next was at two – it was the two o’clock tour that Shion and everyone in line ahead of him stood waiting to get tickets for. Shion knew from Safu’s reading of the pamphlet that getting into Nezumi’s tour was only by raffle. He planned on purchasing tickets every two hours until he got Nezumi’s tour. There was a rule – only one ticket per person per tour period – and only this rule prevented Shion from planning to buy thousands of tickets to ensure he’d get to see Nezumi as soon as possible.

            Safu pointed at a section of the pamphlet. “You can’t get a ticket. They instated level one vamp screenings on anyone who wants a tour for Nezumi’s protection.”

            “What?” Shion demanded, this time grabbing the pamphlet from Safu’s hands.

            “It’s okay,” Safu said quickly. “I’ll get a ticket and try to get chosen for his tour. Even if you can’t see him touring, the last tour is at eight, so it should finish by ten. You’ll see him tonight.”

            “I can’t wait until tonight,” Shion snapped. He threw the pamphlet back at Safu and glanced at the guards guarding the rope that sectioned off the territory. He just had to get past them, and then he could get to Nezumi, call Nezumi’s name until Nezumi heard him, stopped his tour, ran to Shion and saw that Shion was still alive.

            “If you’re thinking of causing a scene, don’t. They’re on the lookout for vamps, there’s a whole paranoia that Nezumi will be targeted as the last survivor of the Great Slaughter. Why do you think this place has guards? You’ve waited this long, just be patient,” Safu hissed, latching onto Shion’s sleeve and jerking him back when he attempted to step away from her.

            Shion flinched his arm free from her grasp but no longer tried to step away from her. He knew Safu was right, but he could hardly contain himself.

            He was so close to Nezumi, finally, after a month of wondering if he’d ever see the man again. He’d held it together, loosely, for this month, but now he thought his heart would break each second that passed. He didn’t know how he’d survive another few hours when he was so close.

            They inched forward more. Shion checked his phone, saw that it was nearly one o’clock. They were nearer to the front of the line, but there was still a good number of people ahead of them. Shion could see now that people were getting their eyes checked with level one screening devices before they got approved for their tickets.

            “You’ll have to step out of line when we’re close,” Safu told him, peering as well at the people getting their screenings.

            “What do you think it means that Nezumi works here?” Shion asked.

            Safu tilted her head at him. She’d finished reading the pamphlet and was folding it over and over between her fingers.

            Shion bit the inside of his cheek, released it. “It’s just… This is where he grew up. This is where he lived as a child, where his family lived. This is where they died, and this is where he ran from his whole life. And now he’s back here and giving tours. To tourists. Nezumi hates tourists. More than that, he hates the past. He hates _his_ past. I once suggested coming to Kyoto, and he all but hit me.”

            Safu nodded. They shuffled forward in the line. The woman in front of them in line had a child, maybe six or seven, who’d gotten tired standing in line, so she’d picked him up. His arms wound around her neck, and his head peeked out over her shoulder. He watched Shion with wide, unwavering eyes, and even when Shion smiled and waved, the child’s unblinking stare didn’t change.

            It almost seemed accusing, the stare of this boy. As if he could see through Shion’s disguise, his contacts and foundation and hair dye. As if he could tell the heart that raced in Shion’s chest, hardly able to contain itself, so close to breaking, was not a human heart at all.

            Shion forced himself to look away from the boy. “It’s Momoe, right? Whatever she did to him, she changed this about him. She made him want to come back here,” Shion said, when Safu stayed silent.

            “I can only guess at what Momoe did to him,” Safu finally said.

            “Then guess.”

            Safu sighed, stopped folding the pamphlet, maybe because it was too small a square to fold any more. “He spent his life pushing his past out of his mind. Momoe brought it back to the forefront, enough so that it’s possible he couldn’t build a wall between himself and his childhood the way he had before, at least, not one that was so solid, so indestructible. And if he couldn’t ignore his past anymore, it might have only made sense to come here, to confront it, to deal with it head on. Of course, this is all assumption, you need to understand that, I really don’t know the specifics of how Momoe affected his mindset. And I don’t know why he would start giving tours, that is bizarre to me, too. I really can’t imagine Nezumi as a tour guide of anything, certainly not his dynasty’s memorial grounds.”

            Shion rubbed his palms on the thighs of his jeans. They’d been sweating since he’d gotten on the train to Kyoto. He wanted to see Nezumi so badly he could barely breathe.

            It was a relief that Nezumi was alive, that whatever psychological state Momoe had put Nezumi in that had him completely vanishing hadn’t been enough to make him suicidal – no matter what Safu had warned Shion of the dangers of speculating, he hadn’t been able to disregard the possibility, and it had kept him up at nights in the bed he was meant to be sharing with Nezumi.

            Nezumi was alive, but even that wasn’t enough. Shion needed the man to be in front of him. Shion needed to see him, to touch him, to hold him, to press his face deep into Nezumi’s chest and sob the way he hadn’t let himself since Nezumi had vanished.

            He needed to dig his nails into Nezumi’s arms, into his skin and flesh and feel the muscles underneath it, the sinew and ligaments, and smell the blood of him, the fresh, enticing, addicting earthiness of it. Shion needed to prove to himself that Nezumi was real. That Nezumi hadn’t been some delusion all along, just someone Shion had made up one day, back when he used to starve, back when he used to go so many weeks without eating he couldn’t think straight, he couldn’t think at all, he spent more time unconscious than awake.

            Part of Shion, in the past month, had convinced himself that he’d dreamed everything, all of it. That it was a year ago, back before he even knew about Discreet Meat, back when he was searching for a new blood supplier he could afford, back when he was getting desperate and drinking Safu and his mother’s blood and still using _Warm Silk_ foundation and thinking he might have to get a paler shade soon.

            Maybe he’d never found a new blood supplier. Maybe he’d just kept starving, and maybe he’d passed out from hunger one day and had never woken up, and meeting Nezumi, everything that came with meeting Nezumi, was just a fantasy of his dying mind.

            Maybe he was in the last moments before death, and the life he’d had with Nezumi was a hallucination, a desperate attempt of his mind to console itself while his body gave out, a desperate attempt to make his last seconds feel like a lifetime, like the best year of Shion’s life, full of Nezumi and the fulfillment of every human want Shion had known better than to wish for with all of his non-human heart.

*

It was the first day of December, which made it a full week that Nezumi had been giving tours. It was a Saturday, which meant he and the other guides were busy, full tours all morning, and even though it was only two in the afternoon, Nezumi knew it would be like this all day.

            He waited in the long grass a few yards from the ticket booth and the roped barrier while the raffle was being drawn to pick the ten people that would be on his two o’clock tour. He didn’t mind the full tours all day, was used to them and enjoyed them.

            He gave the same speech as the other tour guides, never added a personal anecdote or nostalgic memory even though he knew that was what the people expected. His tours were impersonal, full of the facts that he himself had not even known before his own tours, and Nezumi liked these facts. He liked saying them, knowing that the other guides who’d never lived in the Gin Dynasty were saying the same thing. It was like he was an outsider to this place, someone who had discovered it by accident and happened to be fond of it, happened to want to spend more time in it, so he did, he got a job touring and rented an apartment nearby and would make a life here, doing the same thing every day, showing off the Gin Dynasty memorial grounds to different people but always saying the same thing, these facts that seemed to have nothing to do with him at all.

            If the people on his tours were disappointed, they didn’t show it. They played along, let Nezumi act like any other tour guide even though they all knew he was not. It was a lot like acting on a stage – they all knew it was a lie, but it was a nice sort of lie. A lie that no one minded. A lie that took away a tragedy and made it an attraction to buy tickets for. A lie that erased the deaths of thousands and the absolute terror of one single survivor.

            Because occasionally the tourists had gotten a little touchy, Nezumi had a guard that also came on all of his tours, a middle-aged woman named Aiko who went through moods that Nezumi could not predict. Her current mood was silent, which Nezumi didn’t mind. When her mood was chatty, she often disrupted the tours, and Nezumi had to give her stern looks until she quieted.

            “There they come,” Aiko said, breaking her silence unnecessarily, as Nezumi had seen his selected group stumbling down the slight hill where the ticket booth sat. He recognized one member of the group, who stood out because she was running toward him, and then she was shouting.

             “Nezumi!”

             “We got a live one. Stand back,” Aiko said, flinging an arm out across Nezumi’s chest before stepping forward, holding the mace she carried on her belt loop. “Ma’am, slow down.”

            Safu stopped running abruptly, a few feet from Aiko and Nezumi. Her eyes went from the mace to Nezumi. She was breathing hard from her sprint from the ticket area.

            “Hi,” Nezumi said. He couldn’t register anything he felt at all, but that wasn’t new. He hadn’t felt anything, really, in about a month. He liked feeling nothing. It felt right.

            “Hi,” Safu said back, breathless. “Are you going to let this woman mace me?”

            “Aiko, you shouldn’t mace her,” Nezumi told his guard, who lowered her mace slowly.

            “Can I hug him? The pamphlet said no, but I’m a friend, not a crazy person,” Safu said, looking at Aiko now.

            Aiko glanced at Nezumi, who shrugged.

            “She’s not crazy,” he verified.

            “I’m going to hug him now,” Safu said, eyes still on Aiko, and when Aiko stayed silent, Safu ran forward and jumped at Nezumi, who caught her, surprised, stumbling back but catching his balance as Safu squeezed him so tightly he could barely breathe. “Thank you for being alive,” Safu whispered, almost fiercely and deep in his ear.

            Nezumi had no idea how to reply to this, so he did not. He let her hug him. He could not remember the last person who’d touched him, outside the tourist from a few days before who was the reason he now had Aiko by his side.

            Safu released him, but not fully, her hands latching onto the front of his jacket. “Look at me.”

            “I’m looking at you,” Nezumi confirmed, but he wasn’t, really, he was glancing at the other people in the tour who had just caught up, some of whom were taking pictures with the disposable cameras they were able to purchase at the ticket booth because phones were not allowed on tour. As if Safu’s odd display was part of the tour as well, the first stop.

            “He’s alive. Shion is alive, he never died, he never even got hurt. He’s here, he came with me, but he couldn’t get a ticket.”

            Nezumi did look at Safu now. She looked very calm and very serious. She looked so familiar it was almost startling, the odd way it made Nezumi’s chest feel, the way he did not want to feel because he preferred the feeling of nothing. She looked like someone from his past and not his present, and really, that was all she was.

            Nezumi lifted his hands, placed them over Safu’s, removed her fingers from his jacket.

            “My tour is starting now,” Nezumi said, just as calmly.

            “You have to believe me. Come with me. He’s just up on that hill, behind the ropes, he’s waiting for you, he’s been waiting for you.” Safu was tugging on Nezumi’s hand now, but he slipped it free.

            “Safu, I’m glad to see you, but you have to let me do my job. I’m on the clock now, I have an obligation to these other people. If you can’t behave, I’ll have to ask Aiko to escort you out of the tour.”

            “Are you kidding me?” Safu shouted. “Who gives a shit about your tour?”

            “Ma’am, please quiet down, we’ll be starting now,” Aiko said, coming to stand beside Nezumi, her hand on the mace that was hooked again to her belt loop.

            Safu threw her hands into the air. “Fucking ridiculous, fine, do your stupid tour,” she snapped.

            “Please, mind your language,” said another woman, this one behind Safu and holding hands with a little boy.

            “Oh, I’m sorry,” Safu said quickly, slapping her hand over her mouth.

            Aiko nodded at Nezumi, who started his usual tour as he always did, as his tour guides had done for him.

            Nezumi was glad that Safu did not interrupt during his tour. It was nice to see her, he supposed, but jarring, and Nezumi preferred the routine of his tours unbroken. He liked his script, saying the same things over and over.

            The deeper Nezumi took the group into Gin Dynasty territory, the more burn spots appeared. They were vast, circular areas where heaps of bodies had been piled and burned. Grass had grown in the twenty-one years that had passed on the soil that laid beneath these bodies, but the grass was shorter than that surrounding it, a little less green, a little less lively.

            Nezumi pointed to one of the burn spots when they came up to it and explained what it was. He didn’t offer much detail because people already knew what happened, and there were often children on the tours. This time, there was just the one child, the boy whose mother had chastised Safu for cursing. As they wove around the burial spots and Nezumi pointed to where the houses had been, and the schools and the library and the other buildings that were included in the general tour speech Nezumi had been taught, the little boy was silent.

            It was at the stream along the edge of the forest that the boy began to complain.

            “I’m so sorry about this,” his mother insisted, as Nezumi stopped his speech because the kid was pulling his mom’s arm, insisting she let them leave, his voice getting increasingly louder.

            “That’s okay,” Nezumi said. He crouched down beside the kid, who was hugging his mother’s legs now. “Is it the stream that’s bothering you?” Nezumi asked, even though this was not part of his tour speech, and the boy turned his cheek so that his face was no longer buried in his mother’s thigh but peeking at Nezumi.

            He nodded once, cheek rustling his mother’s jeans. Nezumi could hear the _snap_ of photographs being taken by the disposable cameras, could hear murmuring behind him. He ignored these things and stretched his arm out, let his fingers touch the surface of the stream.

            He hadn’t touched this stream in over twenty-one years. It was cool on his fingertips. He didn’t know if it felt just like it used to because he couldn’t remember how it used to feel, and he was glad for that.

            “My sister used to be scared of the water. Not the water, what might have been inside of it. She told me there were voices there, whispering. She would tell me to listen closely, and I could hear them. Can you?”

            The boy cast his wide eyes from Nezumi to the stream again. He had unlatched from his mother now and crouched by the side of the stream beside Nezumi. When he reached out, his thin arm too short to touch the water, so Nezumi cupped his palm, let water fill it, brought it to the boy, who dipped his fingers into the shallow puddle, his fingertips rustling the skin of Nezumi’s palm.

            “I hear them,” the boy whispered. “I’ve been hearing them. Ghosts. It’s haunted here, isn’t it?”

            Nezumi looked down at the stream. He knew there was nothing in it but running water and schools of freshwater fish, but he let himself pretend there were ghosts in there, too. He touched the water again, and it was warmer now. He tightened his fist in it, tried to grab onto something, to keep it with him.

            “I don’t think the ghosts will hurt us,” Nezumi said, finally, taking his hand from the water.

            “Because they’re your family,” the boy said, and Nezumi stood up.

            “That’s right,” Nezumi said, already turning away from the stream, forgetting to do the part of the speech that he did beside it and walking away from it.

            He felt lost, for a moment, forgetting where to go next, forgetting where he was and who was with him, forgetting this was a tour at all and that it wasn’t twenty-one years ago and that he didn’t live here. He looked for the familiar patches of flowers, the familiar rocks, the familiar sight of his sister running ahead of him, calling back for him to catch up, they’d be late for dinner and Mom would be mad.

            A hand touched his arm, and Nezumi flinched, looked to his side and saw Aiko there, staring straight ahead.

            “The market,” she said, without looking at him, and Nezumi remembered he was not a child and he was giving a tour, the next stop was the market. Or, what remained of the market, which was not much, but people still took photographs of it with their disposable cameras.

            Nezumi led the group to the market. His fingers were still wet from the stream, but he didn’t wipe them off, let them dry in the wind that gusted occasionally into them, had the people on tour curling their shoulders into their chests and zipping up their jackets as they continued on.

            At the tour’s end, Nezumi answered questions. Occasionally, someone asked him a personal question about his own childhood, or his own experience of the Great Slaughter. More often than not, he was asked how he survived, and if anyone else survived with him.

            No one asked him anything personal this time, and it was a relief. Safu, too, was silent as she had been all tour, and then Nezumi was leading them to the gift shop, where he’d drop them off before getting a ten-minute break before his next tour.

            Safu didn’t follow the other tourists into the gift shop.

             “You’re supposed to go to the gift shop,” Nezumi told her, as if maybe she just hadn’t understood his instructions the first time, hadn’t noticed the other people on tour heading to the shop.

            Safu still didn’t go to the gift shop. “Shion is not one of those ghosts, Nezumi. He loves you, and he’s waiting for you.”

            “Ma’am,” Aiko said, hand on her mace.

            Safu didn’t even look at her.

            Nezumi felt as if he could still hear the stream from where they stood, even though the gift shop was nearly a mile away from it. He tilted his head, tried to hear the rushing water more clearly. Wondered if what he heard was Shion, the sound of him, trapped inside of its rush.

            “Why would I lie to you?” Safu asked.

            “I never said you were lying,” Nezumi replied.

            Safu’s eyes flicked back and forth between Nezumi’s, like she was reading him. Nezumi wondered what she read, or if all she saw was the blank page of him, the nothingness he felt.

             “If he’s alive, don’t you want to see him?” she asked.

            When Nezumi tried to picture Shion’s face, he couldn’t. He thought he remembered Shion’s smile, goofy and childish, but he was sure he was remembering incorrectly. Nobody was that happy. No vamp could ever have a smile like that.

            “I want you to go back home, Safu. It was good to see you, thanks for visiting.”

            Safu’s eyebrows creased. “I’m not visiting. Shion and I are bringing you back home.”

            “I am home.” Nezumi glanced at Aiko, who slipped her mace free from her belt.

            “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to join the others in the gift shop. There are some lovely handbags in there, modeled after the purses woven by Gin Dynasty weavers. I have one myself.”

            “Nezumi, listen to me, you’re not thinking straight, you’re not yourself, Momoe’s still in your head, and you’re – ”

            At Momoe’s name, Nezumi jerked back, an involuntary motion, as if he’d been slapped, and Safu reached out, and Aiko sprayed the mace.

*

After Safu was escorted out of Gin Dynasty territory by two of the guards, she persuaded Shion that it’d do no good to wait for Nezumi right outside the memorial grounds for the next six hours before he was done work for the day.

            She somehow convinced Shion to walk away from the memorial grounds, where Shion had spent the two hours while Safu was on tour staring at the large stone memorial plaque and touching the carved names on it, wondering which ones belong to Nezumi’s parents and sister. He realized he didn’t even know their names, and that should have been strange, but it wasn’t. Nezumi preferred not to discuss his past. The fact that he was giving tours of it was unthinkable.

            They went to a bakery nearby, and Safu ordered four buns with red bean paste even though they were significantly large and, obviously, Shion wouldn’t eat any.

            Her eyes were red and wet, as was the skin around them. She rubbed them in between ripping pieces of dough from the edges of a bun.

            “What do you mean, different?” Shion pressed, as the only information Safu had given him on Nezumi while filling him in on how she’d gotten maced and dragging him away from the memorial grounds was _He’s…different,_ which could have meant anything.

            Safu slowly chewed. Swallowed even more slowly. Took an excruciatingly slow sip of her tea while Shion tried not to shout at her and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs again.

            “Well,” Safu finally said, setting down her teacup, “his hair is different. I think it’s the same length, but he had his bangs clipped to the top of his head, I’ve never seen him do that. Even in the bakery Karan was always yelling at him for his loose bangs, saying they’d get in the icing when he bent down close to the cakes, remember? Maybe the tour company asked him to, so his eyes would be more obvious,” Safu mused.

            “I don’t care about his hair,” Shion said, even though this was a lie. He cared about everything.

            Safu ripped free another strip of her bun, but to Shion’s relief, she didn’t lift it to her lips.

            She sighed, ripped the strip in half, then in half again before speaking. “Even with you, even though you broke his walls down more than anyone, he was still guarded. There was mystery to him, anyone could look at him and see he was a man with secrets, secrets that were terrible and dark, secrets that no one would ever know. But now… He didn’t look like that. He didn’t look like a man with secrets. He didn’t look guarded, or wary, or anything, really. He seemed, well, like anyone else. Normal.”

            “Normal?” Shion couldn’t imagine a stranger word used to describe Nezumi. His Nezumi? Normal?

            Nezumi was extraordinary. He was incredible. He was breathtaking and unknowable, he was soft and sharp simultaneously, his eyes were bright with galaxies when he laughed and darker than the deepest depths of the sea when he narrowed them in anger.

            He was not normal, and neither was Shion, and that was why they worked. A normal human would never love a vamp as Nezumi did. A normal human could never love anyone, vamp or human, so hard, so fiercely, so recklessly, as Nezumi did.

            “Muted. Maybe that’s a better way to put it,” Safu said, still ripping the strip of dough. “He’d overturn the world for you, you know. He put both your lives in danger enough for that to be clear. But that man giving the tours, I don’t know that he’d do any of that. He wouldn’t rob a hospital of all its blood supply without a second thought. He wouldn’t keep your identity secret through torture of any kind, certainly not the kind Momoe inflicted on him. He wouldn’t even take the chance that you were alive to come see you, he wouldn’t risk the disappointment, when before he’d have risked his life just to look at you. That man wasn’t Nezumi.”

            “I don’t think he’d have risked his life just to look at me,” Shion murmured, looking away from Safu, out the window beside their table. This part of Kyoto was beautiful, serene, calm, in a way Tokyo was not. This particular area, being so close to Gin Dynasty territory, seemed dedicated to tourists. Small shops with Gin Dynasty clothes and fans and mugs and keychains and phone cases hugged the bakery. Even the bakery had a _Gin Dynasty bun_ that they advertised as “very authentic.”

            Nezumi should have hated it here. Nezumi did not belong here, and he should have seen that.

            When Shion looked away from the window, Safu was again rubbing her eyes.

            “Are you sure you don’t want to go to a doctor?” Shion asked.

            “No, no, there’s nothing they’ll be able to do. Besides, I don’t trust you not to go back to the tour site and try to get past the guards to find Nezumi.”

            Shion rested his cheek on his palm. “I had to try,” he mumbled, and Safu smiled lightly.

            “You’ll see him tonight. Maybe you’ll snap him out of this, but I want to caution you not to get your hopes up. It might take time to bring the Nezumi we know back.”

            “I don’t see why it should. When he sees I’m alive, he’ll realize whatever nonsense Momoe convinced him of is just psychological bullshit.”

            “Maybe,” Safu said, looking down at her plate.

            “I know him better than you do,” Shion pointed out, and Safu just silently resumed eating her shredded-up buns.

            Shion didn’t care that Safu wasn’t convinced. He knew that by tonight, he’d see Nezumi again, and he’d bring Nezumi home, and everything would go back to how it was – would be better, even, because now Momoe was gone, and there was nothing else to be scared of, no one else that could hurt them or take them away from each other.

*

After Nezumi’s last tour, he headed home. He’d leased a little apartment – smaller even than his hotel room had been – close to the memorial grounds. It was mostly empty, as he didn’t have any belongings here, had no clothes but the ones he’d left Tokyo wearing other than the t-shirts and sweaters the tour company had given him, all of which were white and said in large blue letters across the chest the tour company’s slogan: _REMEMBER THE GIN DYNASTY._

            The usual walk to his apartment took less than ten minutes, but Nezumi didn’t take his usual route. He didn’t leave through the front entrance of the tour-site, past the ropes that blocked off the memorial grounds, past the ticket booth and the winding maze of line-dividers that were filled with people during the day.

            He instead ducked back into the memorial grounds, walked through it, so familiar with it now that he could do so even though the streetlamps the tour company had put up around the site had been turned off for the night.

            Nezumi didn’t want to go where there were lights, didn’t want to go where the rest of the public was, didn’t want to go where he’d have been expected to exit, just in case someone was waiting for him. Or, more accurately, just in case someone wasn’t waiting for him.

            He knew Shion wasn’t alive. He felt it, the death of him, a presence that sat inside Nezumi’s chest, took up all the space in his body. It filled his veins instead of blood, and every single one of his heartbeats pumped a fresh wave of this fact to the tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes. It was a cool presence, chilling, numbing. He didn’t need a reminder that Shion was dead because he carried the fact with him everywhere he went, so there was no reason to leave the way he always did, the way Safu might have expected to find him if she’d asked the right people, and Nezumi knew it was likely she had.

            She was a determined sort of person, Nezumi remembered. When he thought of her, it was in a distant way, a way that was indistinct and vague and hard to pinpoint, as if years had passed since he’d known her.

            Nezumi didn’t know why she’d lie to him. He didn’t remember that about her, that she was the type to lie. Maybe she hadn’t been lying. Maybe she thought Shion was alive, maybe she didn’t have his death inside her the way Nezumi did.

            Nezumi understood. He knew denial, had felt it often as a child, had often wondered when he first arrived on the streets of Tokyo what he was doing, why he didn’t just go back home, his parents were waiting for him so they could have dinner as a family, his sister was getting impatient with him for exploring so long without her.

            He knew better than to succumb to denial again. He knew better than to tempt it, so he took the long way home in the hidden dark of Gin Dynasty territory, winding through the place he used to live, the place he barely remembered at all, the place that felt more like a tour-site than anywhere a child might have lived, and loved, and been loved back until he’d lost everything on a night he used to be certain would be the worst of his life.

*


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! the last scene in this chapter has mentions of cutting/self harm. i have a very clear and impossible to miss warning in bold right before that scene comes up, so if that's something you're trying to avoid, you can feel free to read the beginning of the chapter without worry, and then simply skip the last scene when you see the warning. at the end of the chapter, i have a summary of the last scene for those who prefer to skip it.   
> as always, thanks for reading, and i hope you enjoy the chapter!

Nezumi’s address in Kyoto was not a secret.

            He was a celebrity of sorts in what had become a little tourist town since the Great Slaughter, and Shion and Safu only had to ask seven people where they might find him after he never showed up at the exit of the tour-site after his last tour before they were told exactly where to go.

            Shion hated this. He was glad to know where to find Nezumi, but he hated that other people knew as well, people who had no business knowing where Nezumi was at all times, people who didn’t know Nezumi at all, not like he did, not even close to the way he did.

            There was no lobby in Nezumi’s apartment building, no one to ask the exact room where Nezumi could be found, so Shion and Safu split up and knocked on doors. The building was only three floors – Shion started at the bottom, and Safu started at the top.

            Every time Shion knocked, his pulse was in his knuckles. It was his heart that he rapped against each door, and by the time he finished the first floor and got to the second, his heart ached. His eyes burned and watered, he wanted to crumple to the stained-carpet floors that lined the thin hallways.

            He did not feel eager, he did not feel excited. He felt terrified that Nezumi would not answer any one of these doors. He felt certain, in an instant, that he’d never see Nezumi again. He felt certain that Nezumi had disappeared, vanished like smoke, would forever be gone from him no matter where Shion searched, no matter what Shion did, no matter which door Shion knocked on.

            Shion couldn’t explain his own sudden devastation, his exhaustion and despair. He didn’t know why he wanted to give up when he was so close. He didn’t feel close. He felt farther from Nezumi than he had in the entire month that had passed with no knowledge at all of where he might have been.

            “Hey, he’s not on the third floor, I guess he’s not on the first either since you didn’t call me and you’re here – What are you doing?”

            Shion turned, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes as Safu appeared out the stairwell door.

            “Oh. Did you find him?” she asked, glancing from Shion to the door he stood in front of. He hadn’t even knocked on it yet. His arm felt too heavy. His knuckles felt bruised.

            Shion shook his head.

            “What’s wrong?” Safu asked, stepping forward, looking at Shion almost cautiously.

            Again, he rubbed his eyes. Cleared his throat and shook his head roughly this time. “Nothing. Nothing, let’s keep going. I’ll start here and go left, you go right.”

            Safu looked like she might say something, but she didn’t. She stepped away from him and went to the door on the right of the one Shion stood in front of.

            They knocked at the same time, then waited.

            Shion’s door didn’t open – most of the doors he’d knocked on hadn’t been opened – but Safu’s did, and Shion heard Nezumi’s voice before he looked over.

            “Safu, I need you to leave me alone. I can’t – ”

            “He’s right here,” Safu interrupted, but it was unnecessary, as Shion was in front of Nezumi’s door now, and Nezumi was looking at him, his eyes stilling on Shion’s face, his voice falling away, his lips parted to form a word he didn’t speak.

            Safu had been right. Nezumi did look different with his bangs clipped up out of his eyes. He looked exposed, vulnerable.

            “I’m not dead,” Shion offered. Pointless, stupid words, but to Nezumi, they didn’t seem to be.

            Immediately, the frozen, wide-eyed expression crumbled. It fell into something that looked a bit like heartbreak, but Shion wasn’t sure, couldn’t see it for long as Nezumi was slamming the door of his apartment between them.

            Before Shion could react, Nezumi was shouting, an abrupt and wordless sound, like a shout of frustration or exasperation but louder and a little devastated and breaking at the end into what seemed more like a sob. But that sound was immediately muffled, and Shion was trying the handle of Nezumi’s door, but it was locked.

            “Nezumi, Nezumi,” Shion said, hearing nothing from the other side of the door now. He hit the door with the flat of his palm, was reminded instantly of hitting Nezumi’s locked apartment door back in Tokyo, back when Nezumi had first found out Shion was a vamp.

            “Nezumi!” Shion shouted now, jerking the locked doorknob back and forth, trying to break it. He looked back at Safu, who watched with wide eyes. “We need to get in there. We need to get to him. Nezumi!”

            He hit the door again. He felt nothing but panic. He had not expected this. He had expected everything to get better the moment Nezumi saw him again, he’d expected everything to be perfect, he’d expected Nezumi to grab him and push him against a wall and kiss him hard enough to bruise his lips, he’d expected Nezumi to stare at him for several seconds and then lunge forward and hug him in a way that crushed his bones, he’d expected Nezumi to be wary and cautious and reach out tentatively and touch his cheek the way he did, right on the spot where Shion’s scar was hidden by foundation, and then let his whole palm cup Shion’s cheek, and then let his fingers slip up into Shion’s hair, and then step forward and kiss Shion so lightly Shion wouldn’t even know if the gentle warmth he felt was breath or lips.

            Shion had expected to feel whole and overwhelmed and relieved and warm and comforted and calm and home again. He had not expected to feel panic in a cool rush, his heart thudding against what seemed like the very surface of the skin of his chest.

            This was a silly, nonsensical mistake. He was not dead. That was clear, that was obvious, there was nothing wrong, Momoe was dead, and everything was supposed to be all right now.

            “Nezumi!” Shion shouted again, then lowered his voice, nearly touched his lips to Nezumi’s door as he spoke quietly against it, trying to slip his voice right through the wood. “Remember how I thought you were dead after the JBVIC? Remember how I couldn’t get that out of my head, you in that room, all that blood and nearly lifeless? Remember how it was all in my head, it wasn’t real? What’s in your head isn’t real, Nezumi. I’m real, I’m right here, and I’m alive.”

            There were clattering sounds coming from inside the apartment now, and Shion wasn’t sure if this was more or less reassuring than the silence.

            “What is he doing?” Shion asked, looking at Safu again, who shook her head wordlessly, and then the door whipped open, and Nezumi stood in the doorway with a large kitchen knife in one hand.

            His face was wet and his breathing erratic. He reached out, caught the front of Shion’s jacket, and yanked him forward. Shion stumbled to keep his balance, and then he was inside the apartment and Nezumi was slamming the front door again.

           Shion turned just in time to see Nezumi lock the door between them and Safu in the hallway. There was a band-aid around Nezumi’s forefinger that Shion only saw for a second, as Nezumi’s hand was quickly gripping Shion’s jacket again, slamming him against the inside of the front door. In his other hand, dangling by his side, was the knife.

            “Nezumi, what are you doing?” Safu asked, from the other side of the door, words quick and hushed. Shion could hear the tremble of the doorknob, assumed Safu was trying to open it.

            “Nezumi…” Shion wrapped his hands around Nezumi’s, fisted on his jacket. It was the first time he was touching Nezumi in a month, since Halloween, and it wasn’t the touch he’d imagined in any of the scenarios he’d considered.

            “Shion, are you okay? What’s going on?” Safu called. She sounded almost breathless, while Shion felt that his panic had frozen, that he was mostly numb, looking from the knife Nezumi held to Nezumi’s hard expression.

            He could read nothing on Nezumi’s face but resolution. The knife was large, not a butcher knife, but still one of the bigger kitchen knives.

            “Shion!” The doorknob jiggled harder with the heightened volume of Safu’s voice.

            Nezumi glanced at the door behind Shion. “She’s one of them, too,” he said, after a moment.

            “Me? Is he talking about me? One of what?” Safu asked, the doorknob stilling for a pause.

            “Safu, I’m okay, give us a second,” Shion said loudly, then lowered his voice, tried to keep it even. “Nezumi, forget her, look at me. Tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what’s going on.”

            Nezumi looked at him again. He seemed too calm. “I know what you are,” he said, after a beat.

             “Shion, unlock the door! Why the hell was Nezumi holding a knife, what is going on?” Safu hissed, and Shion could tell she was trying to be heard through the door but not by the neighbors.

            Shion pretended he could not hear her. Focused only on Nezumi.

            “What am I?” Shion asked Nezumi gently, hoping his voice was soothing, trying not to look at the knife, to keep his eyes on Nezumi’s, which were glassy. A tear balanced on the lower lashes of his left eye, shook when he blinked but didn’t fall.

            “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” Nezumi said. His hand had unraveled a bit on Shion’s jacket, but Shion didn’t move. He didn’t want to make any sudden movements. He needed to stay as calm as Nezumi was. He couldn’t let Nezumi hurt him, and he couldn’t let himself go into vamp mode against his own will.

            “Why not?” Shion asked. Safu was muttering outside the door now, quickly and under her breath, and Shion tried to tune her out, hoped the occasional curses she hissed would not affect Nezumi. “Because – Because I’m a vamp?” Shion pressed.

            Nezumi’s resolute expression faltered, doubt appearing in the crease between his eyes. “I don’t care about that,” he said, after a moment, sounding confused.

            “I know you don’t,” Shion said quickly, wanting to reassure him. He wanted more than anything to touch him, to press his body to Nezumi’s, to kiss him, but there was clearly something wrong with him.

            Shion knew better than to pretend the scenarios he’d acted out in his head could happen when Nezumi was like this. He let his back press flat against the door on which Nezumi pinned him.

             “Nezumi, listen, I know you don’t care that I’m a vamp, I shouldn’t have said that, but you’re holding a knife, and it’s scaring me, and it’s scaring Safu. I know you won’t hurt me, but you should put that down, okay?”

            “This happened before. You can’t fool me, this happened before, I know what’s going on,” Nezumi said, determined again, hand tightening around Shion’s jacket once more, and he pulled Shion even closer so that Shion’s back was no longer touching the door.

            “I’m not trying to fool you, Nezumi,” Shion breathed. “What’s going on? What’s happened before? I don’t know, you have to fill me in.”

            Nezumi’s breaths were loud and quick. He looked calm, but he didn’t sound it.

            “Shit, Shion, I’m freaking out here!” Safu said, slamming her hand against the door.        

           “Safu, he’s not going to hurt me, just give us a minute to talk!”

            “You look so real,” Nezumi said, as if he hadn’t heard Safu at all, as if he hadn’t heard Shion’s reply to her.

            Shion tried to even his own breaths. “I am real.”

            Nezumi shook his head. Lifted his arm that’d been at his side and brought the knife closer to Shion, by his neck. He didn’t touch Shion with it, but Shion could no longer see the blade of it, as it was too close to his neck to be in his line of vision.

            Shion was relieved Safu was on the other side of the door.

            “Before you do anything, talk to me. Just talk to me,” Shion managed. None of this felt real, but his heart pounded as if it was. As if Nezumi might kill him when Shion knew, of course, the man would never hurt him. The idea of it was ridiculous. The idea of Nezumi with a knife to his throat was ridiculous, and Shion almost wondered if hadn’t even woken up this morning to see Nezumi’s face on the news as the new tour guide of his own dynasty’s memorial ground, if this was all just a strange, elaborate dream.

            “I don’t want to talk to you,” Nezumi whispered, but he didn’t look convinced, and the tear that had been shaking on his lower lashes fell, not even hitting his cheek but missing his skin completely and falling straight to the floor.

            “I thought you were dead, too. I thought you died in that room in vamp hunter headquarters. But I was wrong, remember how I was wrong?” Shion said gently.

            “I’m not wrong,” Nezumi replied. His hand uncurled from Shion’s jacket, slid up along Shion’s throat, up higher to slip around Shion’s jaw and stayed there. Nezumi’s fingers touched the bottom of Shion’s ear. His thumb rested on Shion’s cheek.

            Shion took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. He wanted to be relieved that Nezumi was no longer clutching his jacket or pinning him to the door, but Nezumi’s knife was still at his throat.

            “You’re warm,” Nezumi said. He sounded surprised.

            It was cold outside, the first night of December, but Shion had been running around the apartment building. He was hot in his jacket and the sweater underneath it, sweat dampening his lower back and under his arms. Vamps rarely got the privilege to be warm, but Shion was, he ate properly, and it was all because of the man in front of him with one hand around the side of his jaw and the other holding a knife to his throat.

            “Let me kiss you,” Shion told Nezumi softly, and the moment he said it, Nezumi’s hand tightened around his jaw, and then Shion could feel the tip of Nezumi’s knife.

            It was cool, almost a relief to Shion’s own body heat, against his neck. Right at the jugular.

            “Shion…” Safu whispered, as if she could see through the door, could see the new position of Nezumi’s knife, but her voice sounded far away, too far away to matter.

            “You don’t want to kiss me?” Shion asked, wondering as he spoke the words if they were the wrong words to speak, if they would make it worse – _it,_ whatever it was, Shion didn’t know, he had no idea what was happening, what was wrong with Nezumi or how to fix it, he had no idea what was safe to say and what would make Nezumi move his knife closer, slip it into Shion’s skin.

            Nezumi’s jaw clenched, Shion could see from the flinch of his cheek. “No,” he finally said, after a long pause.

            “Why not?” Shion asked.

            “Shion, open the door,” Safu pleaded.

            Nezumi didn’t seem to hear Safu any of the times she spoke. His eyes stayed on Shion’s, dropping only occasionally to Shion’s lips, like at that moment.

            Nezumi licked his own lips. His jaw clenched again. His hand dropped from Shion’s face, though the knife remained where it was. “Don’t do that,” he said quietly.

            “Do what?” Shion asked.

            “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to kiss you or – or any of this, I don’t want this,” Nezumi said, the knife jerking against Shion’s neck as Nezumi was clearly agitated, and Shion felt the sharp point of it dig into him but couldn’t tell if it had broken his skin or not.

            “I can’t call the police, I can’t do anything from out here,” Safu insisted from outside the door.

            “Everything is fine, Safu,” Shion said back, keeping his eyes on Nezumi. When he spoke, he felt the skin of his neck moving against the tip of the knife.

            Shion didn’t want to call the police. He was a vamp, and it was never good to be near police, and Shion knew that was why Safu wouldn’t call them, but that wasn’t the reason Shion was against it.

            He didn’t want Nezumi to get in trouble. He didn’t want either of them to be in trouble. He wanted, for once, for them both to be healthy and happy, and he knew they could have that, he knew their futures could be incredible, but Nezumi needed to snap out of this, whatever was going on, whatever was happening, so suddenly and strangely.

            “Okay, you don’t want to kiss me, that’s okay. What do you want, Nezumi? Just tell me, it’ll all be okay, just tell me what you want.”

            “I want you to go away,” Nezumi said, so quietly his voice was almost just breath.

            Shion bit his lip. He didn’t want to go away. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He’d rather be here with a trembling knife at his throat than anywhere else in the world without Nezumi.                          “But I missed you,” Shion confessed. He decided he would be honest. He didn’t know what lies would make Nezumi calm down, so maybe it was the truth that would work best.

            Nezumi didn’t react to this. He just looked at Shion. The knife did not move away from his neck nor into it.

            “You’re holding a knife to my throat,” Shion said, after giving Nezumi a minute to reply and getting nothing.

            “I know.”

            “Am I bleeding?”

            Nezumi’s eyes slipped down to Shion’s throat, then up again. “No. You don’t have blood.”

            Shion didn’t know if this meant the knife had broken his skin and his poison was coming out rather than blood, or if his skin hadn’t been broken at all. He decided not to ask this.

            “Why do you have a knife to my throat?” he asked instead.

            “To cut off your head,” Nezumi said, voice completely even.          

            “Shion!” Safu nearly shouted this time.

            Shion swallowed. He wasn’t scared, but he didn’t completely trust Nezumi not to hurt him anymore. This Nezumi was strange. Unpredictable. He had Momoe in his head, even though Momoe was dead, and Shion contemplated mentioning this, but he didn’t know how Nezumi might react to hearing Momoe’s name, how a reminder of Momoe might affect the knife in Nezumi’s hand, which was steady now.

            “What good will that do?” Shion asked.

            “Then I won’t be able to talk to you. I won’t be able to kiss you. I won’t be able to want you,” Nezumi answered, voice becoming more hesitant as he spoke, knife starting to shake again.

            Shion tried not to wince. He was pretty sure the knife had broken his skin now. There was probably poison on Nezumi’s kitchen knife.

            “And this is the only solution?” Shion asked gently. He didn’t care about a possible cut on his neck. He cared about whatever was wrong enough with Nezumi to make the man hold a knife to him.

            “No,” Nezumi said. “I don’t have to do anything to you. I could put the knife down and kiss you and move to Tokyo with you and live with you and be happy with you.”

            Shion waited, but Nezumi said nothing more. He just looked at Shion in that resolute way.

            “Maybe you should do that, then. The second option,” Shion finally said, hesitant, knowing on some level this was a trap, but Nezumi didn’t slice his head off.

            If anything, he seemed to get sad. His shoulders fell, but the knife stayed against Shion’s neck.

            “I already did,” Nezumi said, words mostly air.

            Shion would have shaken his head if there wasn’t a knife to his throat. “We never had a real chance, there was always something. You didn’t know I was a vamp, and then you found out, and meanwhile I was starving, and then you stole the blood, and then – ”

            “Not with you.”

            “What?” Shion asked, confused at the interruption, still thinking of all the ways he and Nezumi hadn’t been allowed to just live with each other, know each other and fall in love with each other and share their lives with each other the way two humans would have been allowed. They’d loved each other so hard, and it had never been enough, and it was all because Shion was a vamp.

            “When my family died, they came back, too.” Nezumi said, which was enough to distract Shion from everything he was thinking. “First just Mom, but Dad and my sister joined us, too, after a few weeks. You think you’re the only one to come back? You think you’re the only one to do this to me?”

            The knife pushed harder against his neck. Shion didn’t even feel it. He felt nothing but the hardness of Nezumi’s gaze, heavy on his face.

            “I let them stay. I let them trick me into thinking they were real. I didn’t know any better than to believe people could come back from the dead, but now I do, now I know to get rid of you, now I know to move on.”

            Shion had no idea where the knife was. Maybe it was halfway through his throat. Maybe Nezumi had dropped it. Shion didn’t care at all.

            “How long did they stay with you?” he managed to ask.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes just slightly, barely noticeably. “Maybe a year,” he said, after a moment.

            “Why did they leave?”

            Shion had never known Nezumi had hallucinated his family coming back to him after the Great Slaughter. He knew nothing about Nezumi as a child. Shion was fully aware that it was only because of Momoe’s torture that now Nezumi was talking about these things, but Shion wanted to learn them even so.

            Nezumi’s gaze remained narrowed. When he spoke, it was evenly, without emotion. “They weren’t there all the time. They showed up only when I hadn’t eaten for a few days. I stopped eating so they’d stay with me more often, but Mom said I had to eat at least once a week. So I did that, but after I ate, they’d be gone again for a few days. And that was fine for a while, but then I didn’t want them to be gone at all, so I stopped eating all the time, even when Mom got mad. And then she got so mad she left. And she took Dad too, and my sister. And they never came back no matter what I did, even when I starved myself for the longest I could manage. They didn’t come back because they were dead, they’d always been dead, and I let myself pretend they weren’t. I won’t do that now.”

            “Shion, this is serious.” Safu’s voice came quietly through the door, nearly making Shion jump, as he’d forgotten she was even there.

            He didn’t take his eyes from Nezumi, even as she spoke again.

            “He really thinks you’re dead. He’s not going to listen to either of us. He thinks I’m a hallucination, too, it’s the only thing that makes sense to him right now.”

            Nezumi’s eyes slid off Shion to the side of him, and Shion knew he was looking at the closed door from which Safu’s voice came.

            “You can let him go, Nezumi. That’s another option,” Safu said through the door. She spoke calmly now, as Nezumi had. “I’ll take him away from here. We won’t come back.”

            “I don’t believe you,” Nezumi said.

            “If we’re hallucinations, you can’t kill us. What good will it do?” Safu asked. “We’ll just keep coming back.”

            Nezumi’s eyes narrowed more, this time much more noticeably.

            “Safu,” Shion interjected. “Maybe you shouldn’t – ”

            Safu interrupted him loudly. “If you hurt us, Nezumi, if you hurt Shion, that’s all you’ll think about when you think of him. Don’t you want to think about the good memories? Don’t ruin him for yourself. I know it hurts to remember him now, but one day, you’ll want to think about him. You’ll want to remember. And you won’t want to remember hurting him, even if you know he was just a hallucination. The memory will still feel real, won’t it? Don’t the memories you made of your parents visiting you after the Great Slaughter still feel real, even though you know they’re not?”

            “I won’t ever want to remember him,” Nezumi said to the door.

            “Of course, you will. You loved him. You were happy with him. You think about the past as a bad thing, but with Shion, it was really lovely, wasn’t it? Don’t you want it to stay that way? If you hurt him now, anytime you remember him in the future you’ll feel sick with what you did. Hallucination or not, he looks real, right? He looks alive. You said it yourself, he feels warm. If you hurt him, he’ll scream just the same as he would have if he was alive. Do you want that memory? Do you want his screams in your ears, or do you want the rest of his voice, the words he gave to you and the sound of his laugh?”

            The doubt was clear on Nezumi’s face now. His eyes flicked from the door to Shion and back again.

            “Maybe you don’t know what you want right now. That’s okay. But you don’t want this,” Safu said, voice even more soft as it came through the door, and Shion felt the knife leave his neck, watched Nezumi take a step back from him, then again.

            Shion did not often forget Safu was well-versed in psychoanalysis. He did not often forget she had a PhD in psychiatry. He did not often forget how brilliant she was, but he rarely was able to witness her work like this, take control of a situation and calm someone’s mind, and it amazed him despite the circumstances.

            Now that Nezumi had stepped away from him, Shion could see the knife again. Nowhere on the blade was red. Shion touched his neck, and it wasn’t wet. He hadn’t been cut at all.

            “Can you leave now?” Nezumi asked. His voice was small. He dropped the knife, and to Shion’s relief, it didn’t land on Nezumi’s socked foot but the floor an inch from it, but Nezumi didn’t seem to even notice. He reached out, unlocked the door, and immediately, it opened and Safu was beside Shion.

            “Yes, we can leave,” Safu said, and Shion felt her hand grab his.

            “Wait, Safu – ”

            “We’re leaving,” Safu said, more insistent, and she yanked Shion out through the doorway before Shion could stop her.

            Shion tried to fight her in the hallway as she dragged him to the staircase. “If you think I’m going to leave him – ”

            “Will you stop pulling? I don’t think that, but right now, if you hadn’t noticed, he has a rather large knife. Why don’t we try again when that’s not in reach? We need to make a plan, we have more information on how he’ll react, and we have to think this through. We’ll get a hotel here and stay the night.”

            Shion allowed Safu to pull him down the stairs and out of Nezumi’s apartment building only because she had mentioned a hotel, so he knew they would not be leaving Kyoto.

            Shion didn’t plan on going home unless Nezumi was with him.

*

**TRIGGER WARNING: CUTTING/SELF HARM**

**the next scene has mild images of cutting/self harm. while it's not described too explicitly, it is still present in the scene. if that's not something you want to read, skip the following scene (it is the last scene of the chapter. there's a summary of the scene without descriptions of cutting/self harm at the end of the chapter if you want to know what happened without having to read the imagery of it)**

 

*

When Shion and Safu left, Nezumi took a shower.

            He turned the water on hot and waited in the spray for it to warm. At first, it was ice cold, and Nezumi let himself numb, refused to shiver, refused to flinch, refused to step out of the spray.

            It slowly warmed. He stood very still with his eyes closed. He’d picked up the knife from the floor by the door and had forgotten to drop it off in the kitchen, so he held it still. He also hadn’t taken off his clothes, and they weighed heavily on him, his jeans sticking to his legs, his tour company _REMEMBER THE GIN DYNASTY_ sweater plastering to his arms and chest.

            When the water was the perfect temperature, Nezumi opened his eyes. He looked at the knife that he held. It was the only kitchenware he’d bought, other than a pot, and a bowl, and a spoon, and a fork, and a mug. All of these things he’d bought at the dollar store. The knife he held was not sharp. It took ages and unnecessary force to cut through potatoes.

            Nezumi wondered how long it would take to cut through skin. How much force would be required. Nezumi used to be strong, but recently, he’d felt weak. He was so tired. His wet clothes were so heavy on his frame, and it took everything for Nezumi to simply remain standing in the spray.

            He lifted the knife. Touched it to the pad of his thumb on his other hand, just to feel the blade of it. It was not sharp. He pressed it harder, and it indented his skin but didn’t break it. He pressed it harder, and slid his thumb against it, from bottom to top, slowly, watching his skin break like a jacket being unzippered, watching his blood coat the blade.

            He slid his thumb down the blade again. It was painful, but he’d imagined worse. He’d felt worse. Worse was Momoe’s knife in his chest, words carved there. Worse was the fire on his back, skin melted and morphed.

            He slid his thumb up the blade again. There was a lot of blood now, more pain, but it wasn’t enough.

            Shion hadn’t come back yet.

            Nezumi slid his thumb again. He didn’t know how much pain it would take to bring Shion back. He was not used to pain bringing the dead back, it was starvation that had worked before, but Nezumi had already tried starving himself, and that hadn’t brought him back. Shion had only come back today, only after Nezumi had come home from his last tour, only after he’d accidentally sliced into the tip of his forefinger while cutting the damn potatoes – the knife was so dull, it was hard to cut them, it had just been a matter of time before he slipped and cut his finger.

            And the moment after he’d cut his finger and applied a band-aid to it, there’d been a knock on the door. There’d been Safu again but this time Shion had been with her.

            So it was not starvation that would bring Shion back, but pain. That was fine. Nezumi was good at enduring pain.

            He slid the knife now across his open palm, right along one of the creases. He waited for Shion to come back because that was how it worked with the dead.

            They came, and they vanished, and they came, and they vanished, and then they left forever, but it was too soon for Shion to leave forever. Nezumi’s family had stayed at least a year after they died, so Shion would too.

            Nezumi knew how it worked. It’d been silly, really, to try and scare Shion off. The dead could not be scared off. They could not be beheaded. They could not be killed. They were just tricks of the mind, and Nezumi had thought he was strong enough to resist the tricks of his own mind, he’d thought he was strong enough to resist the temptation of these tricks, but he wasn’t strong at all.

            He was weak under the heavy weight of his wet clothes, under the steaming shower spray. He slid the knife across another crease of his palm and waited to hear Shion’s voice.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick summary of the last scene if you skipped it due to the trigger warning:  
> nez became convinced that pain would bring what he believed to be the hallucination of shion back because it was only after accidentally cutting his finger while cooking after he got home from work that shion suddenly appeared at his door. starvation brought his family back from the dead, and now nez is certain that pain is what brings shion back from the dead. in this scene, nez loses the willpower to resist the temptation of hallucinating. he stands in the shower and cuts his thumb and his palm with the kitchen knife he had threatened shion with, waiting for shion to come back - though, of course, shion does not appear.


	32. Chapter 32

The next day, Shion and Safu waited outside the front of Nezumi’s building at seven in the morning. His first tour, they knew, was at eight, and he lived close to the tour site. Arriving at seven was early, and Shion was prepared to wait.

            When it was 7:56, Shion was past concerned.

            “Maybe he’s just running late,” Safu offered, as she had been for the previous ten minutes while Shion had showed her the passing time on his phone.

            “This late? He only has four minutes to get to work.”

            “He ran late to the theater all the time. Nezumi has never been very concerned with time.”

            “He wasn’t okay when we left him last night. You saw that, you know that, we can’t just not be concerned. We shouldn’t have left. Why did we leave?”

            “No, you’re right, we should have let him behead you with a chef’s knife,” Safu said, sighing and stretching her legs out in front of her onto the road. She was sitting on the sidewalk curb, where she’d been sitting since seven in the morning.

            Shion had long since gotten up. He was pacing the empty road in front of her now, staring up at the building.

            “Maybe there’s a back exit, and he already left out that way,” Safu said.

            “There isn’t. We already checked.”

            “It’s a fire hazard not to have a back exit. I think it’s illegal, actually, in violation of building codes. We might have missed it.”

            “How do you know so much about building codes?” Shion snapped.          

            They’d decided in their hotel room the night before that the best time to approach Nezumi again would be when he wasn’t at his apartment, where there were clearly knives at his disposal, but where he wasn’t at work either, where he had guards who carried mace and possibly guns too.

            That left the walk from Nezumi’s apartment to work.

            “Do you want to look for the back exit again? He could come out while we’re looking.”

            “You could look, and I’ll wait here,” Shion said.

            “I don’t think you should be alone with him.”

            “Then what do you think we should do? Wait here forever? Look, it’s 7:58 now. We have to go up to his room again.”

            “Where he has a knife and possibly other things to try to kill you with,” Safu said.

            “He’s not going to kill me,” Shion said back, already heading past Safu toward the building, opening the door and turning to see that she’d gotten up and followed him.

             “I know he’d normally never hurt you, but he already thinks you’re dead, Shion. You have to be careful, I need to read the situation more before I can decide how we should proceed,” Safu said as they headed up to the second floor, then to Nezumi’s door.

            Shion was about to knock, but Safu pulled his arm down before he could.

             “Let go of me!”

             “Stand over there, out of view. Let me talk to him first,” Safu said, and before Shion could protest, the door opened.

            Nezumi did not look surprised to see them. Nor was he holding a knife.

            “Hi,” he said, looking at Shion. His expression was not hard, but soft and open and almost happy, and Shion tried to compose himself, to go along with whatever was happening with Nezumi now.

            “Hey, hi,” Shion said back.

            “What happened to your hand?” Safu asked.

            Shion hadn’t even noticed Nezumi’s hand. He didn’t know how Safu could be looking at Nezumi’s hand when Nezumi was starting to smile, his lips slowly lifting.

            “It’s nothing,” Nezumi said, still smiling lightly. His eyes fell all over Shion. Shion made himself look at Nezumi’s hand.

            A t-shirt was wrapped around it. It was a white t-shirt, but it was stained red.

            “That’s not nothing,” Safu said, reaching out as if to grab Nezumi’s wrist, but he stepped back before she could.

            “Do you want to come in? Or go somewhere? Get breakfast? Did you eat yet?” Nezumi asked, holding his hand behind him now, but in such a casual way it might not even have been deliberate.

            “I – Um – No, I didn’t eat,” Shion managed. Nezumi was happy. Shion could see that clearly, how happy Nezumi was, an innocent kind of happiness, as if he’d never vanished at all or held a knife to Shion’s neck. As if nothing bad had ever happened to him in all his life. “I, uh, I can’t eat,” Shion reminded, after a moment.

            He hadn’t brought any blood with him. He hadn’t expected he’d have to spend the night.

            “Oh, yeah,” Nezumi said, and he laughed, as if laughing at himself, like he was an idiot for forgetting Shion was a vamp, for forgetting they didn’t often go out to breakfast together.

            “If you’re hungry, we can go somewhere,” Shion offered. He knew something was wrong, but he didn’t want to figure out what. Nezumi’s easy laugh lingered still in his ears. Whatever had changed since the night before didn’t matter, as long as Nezumi could stay happy like this.

            “What’s going on?” Safu said sharply, clearly not thinking along Shion’s same lines. “We’re coming inside, move.”

            She pushed Nezumi aside and walked into his apartment, and Shion followed, almost reluctant, not wanting to be back in this apartment again.

            Nezumi closed the door behind him but didn’t lock it this time. He reached out – with his right hand, the one free of the bloody t-shirt – and caught Shion’s wrist. Pulled him closer, and Shion let himself be pulled.

            Safu had gone deeper into Nezumi’s apartment, disappeared somewhere, but Shion didn’t care what she was doing. He didn’t care about her at all, as Nezumi was ducking his head down, his forehead touching Shion’s, and then his nose, and then his lips.

            His kiss was soft as his expression, soft as his voice, soft as his laugh. Shion breathed him in, and in this deep inhale, he smelled the incredible earthiness of Nezumi’s blood more tangibly than he would have if it’d all been encased in Nezumi’s body where it belonged.

            He pulled back. Reached for Nezumi’s left arm, held it between them and looked at the bloody t-shirt. He’d wanted to ignore it, to pretend Nezumi was happy and only happy, but he couldn’t ignore the smell he loved.

            “What happened?” he asked.

            “Cooking accident. It doesn’t matter,” Nezumi said easily. His unharmed hand was on Shion’s neck, sliding up the nape of it into Shion’s hair, coaxing Shion back toward him.

            “Wait – Nezumi, let me just look at it, this blood is wet, did you just do this? I don’t think you tied the t-shirt tightly enough, I can help you.”

            Nezumi didn’t reply. He was kissing Shion again, and Shion let him because it’d been a month that felt much longer than that, and the feel of Nezumi’s soft lips was only more incredible alongside the strong scent of his blood.

            He was warm and solid and alive and happy and right there, and Shion didn’t know how to pull away from him a second time.

            Shion let go of Nezumi’s hurt hand and wrapped his arms around Nezumi’s neck. Their chests touched, their bodies pressed against each other. Nezumi kissed him more deeply.

            “Shion.”

            Shion ignored Safu, her voice right beside him. He didn’t open his eyes. He wound his arms tighter around Nezumi’s neck, pressed his body closer to Nezumi’s. The feel of his kiss was so familiar Shion could barely stay standing on his own.

            “Shion, let go of him. You have to see something.”

            Shion sighed into Nezumi’s lips, opened his eyes and broke apart from Nezumi for just long enough to glare at Safu.

            “Can’t you give us a minute?”

            “No, I can’t,” Safu said. Shion would have ignored her, but her face was pale, her worry all over it.

            “What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing’s wrong,” Nezumi murmured, his hand slipping up Shion’s sweater, and even when he addressed Safu, he spoke the words into Shion’s neck where he’d ducked his head. “Safu, if you get lost for ten minutes, I’ll give you my next paycheck.”

            “Can’t you smell the blood?” Safu asked, not even looking at Nezumi.

            Shion blinked at her. Felt Nezumi touching him, his lower back beneath his sweater, his waist, rising up his stomach to his chest. Felt Nezumi’s lips on his neck, the underside of his chin, his ear. He could barely concentrate.

            “Yeah. His hand is cut from cooking or something. Right, Nezumi?”

            “Right,” Nezumi murmured into his neck.

            “No, the blood in the bathroom.”

            “What?” Shion asked. He couldn’t think. Nezumi was biting the skin of his neck, and it felt incredible, but only for a second before Shion realized what was happening, and he immediately stepped back.

            “Where are you going?” Nezumi asked, his hand still around the hem of Shion’s sweater.

            “You can’t bite me, you know that. If you accidentally break my skin you’ll have poison in your mouth,” Shion said, hand on his neck.

            Nezumi just looked at him. His gaze was still soft, and Shion had just assumed it was because the man had just woken, and his eyes were always soft when he woke, but over time, they sharpened.

            Now, they didn’t look like the softness in the early morning, a sleepy sort of softness. Now, Nezumi’s gaze seemed unfocused, hazy, not familiar at all.

            Shion stared at him for another moment, feeling his worry form as a smoky thing, unsolidified and uncertain in his stomach, before he looked at Safu. “Where’s the bathroom?”

            Safu turned, and Shion followed her to an open door. He smelled the blood wafting from it immediately, and then he was inside.

            There was blood in the tub. There was blood in the sink, and there was the kitchen knife in the sink too, and there was blood on the knife.

            “We need to get him to my psychiatric hospital. There’s something very wrong. I want to take him to the one in Tokyo where my colleagues work and where I’ve done trials, so I can be part of his case and recovery. I have close colleagues who’ve studied in depth Momoe’s specific version of psychological warfare as well, and I trust them. You’re going to have to convince him to come to Tokyo with us, but you can’t tell him we’re taking him to a hospital, or he won’t want to come.”

            Safu spoke quietly and gently, her hand on Shion’s shoulder. Shion could barely register her words. He looked from the tub to the sink to the knife again, then again, then again.

            “Shion. Look at me. You can’t start freaking out. We need to stay calm and pretend nothing’s wrong. Momoe affected him more than I thought, and the longer he was isolated, the worse it got. You were right, we shouldn’t have left him alone yesterday, but now all we can do is get him to the hospital. He needs professional psychiatric help in the right setting, in a place where he can’t hurt himself or shut us out. But he’s only going to listen to you.”

            “What do I do?” Shion breathed. His head swam with the smell of Nezumi’s blood. His legs felt weak. He wanted to pretend he didn’t understand what was happening. It was easy enough to pretend this because the evidence pointed to something Nezumi would never do, something that would never happen, something unimaginable.

            “It’s clear from the way he’s acting that he still thinks you’re a hallucination. Remember what he said yesterday? Starving himself brought his family back. He almost starved himself to death trying to get them to come back. I think it’s the same thing now, with you. But he isn’t starving himself, obviously. He’s doing…this.”

            “But yesterday, he was trying to get rid of me, he didn’t want to hallucinate,” Shion objected, shaking his head. Like he could change what was happening with a well-formed argument, like he could take away the blood in the tub and the sink and on the knife if he proved Safu wrong.

            “Well, he changed his mind, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. What matters is he wants to spend time with you now because he doesn’t know how long you’ll be around for. If you tell him you want to go to Tokyo, he’ll think you’re disappearing, he might try to hurt himself again to keep you here. You have to make Tokyo seem like his idea. You have to make sure he knows you’re not trying to go anywhere without him.”

            “Shion?” Nezumi called.

            “Go to him now,” Safu said, almost urgently, pushing Shion out the bathroom, and he stumbled, managed to make it to the front door where Nezumi still stood.

            “Don’t worry about the bathroom, that was an accident,” Nezumi said.

            Shion walked up to Nezumi, made himself breathe evenly, made his voice come out unconcerned. “I’m not worried. I know it was an accident. But can I tie this more tightly around your hand?”

            He took Nezumi’s hand without waiting for Nezumi’s response. Unwound the bloody t-shirt and tried not to freak out, tried not to start screaming, tried to ignore the evidence he held in his very hands.

            “Don’t be mad,” Nezumi whispered, while Shion stared at the bloody shreds of skin.

            “I’m not mad,” Shion said back, but now he couldn’t even hear his voice, maybe he hadn’t spoken at all.

            “It was an accident,” Nezumi insisted. He sounded almost scared.

            “I know,” Shion said, making sure he actually spoke this time. “I know it was.” He turned away from the mess of Nezumi’s hand to give himself a break, saw Safu by the hall that led to the bathroom. “Can you bring me a dry t-shirt? Or his pillowcase?”

            Nezumi’s bed was just a sheet spread on the corner of the floor. When Safu pulled the pillowcase from the pillow, Shion saw it wasn’t a pillow at all, but a balled-up sweater.

            “I haven’t bought a pillow yet,” Nezumi said, his smile light as air.

            “You have a pillow at our apartment,” Shion said slowly. Every time he breathed, his head filled with the smell of Nezumi’s blood. “In Tokyo. It’s where I’ve been living, you know. It’s really nice, but lonely without you.”

            “Our apartment,” Nezumi repeated, while Shion traded Safu the bloody t-shirt for the pillowcase. He covered the scored skin of Nezumi’s palm, wrapped the pillowcase also around Nezumi’s thumb, which was sliced right down the center. His blood was a deep, dark red, and every inch of the skin on his hand and fingers that wasn’t torn up was stained a vivid pink with it.

            “I unpacked all our stuff. Don’t you want to see how it looks?” Shion asked. Some of Nezumi’s blood had gotten onto his fingers. He didn’t even want to lick it off. He wiped it carefully on the dry t-shirt.

            “Is that what you want to do today?” Nezumi asked. He slipped two fingers of his uncut hand into the front of Shion’s waistband, pulled him closer even though Shion was still tying the pillowcase on his other hand.

            “Careful, let me finish tying this. It doesn’t hurt?”

            Nezumi shook his head. He bent his head down low until his forehead rested on Shion’s shoulder. His hair tickled Shion’s cheek. It was loose that morning, covered his shoulders.

            “Are you okay?” Shion asked, even though he knew the answer, clearly, he knew the answer. He just wanted Nezumi to keep talking to him, needed the man’s voice to distract him from the temptation to start shouting or sobbing or throwing things or something worse. He finished tying the pillowcase but didn’t let go of Nezumi’s hand, swaddled tight like a baby in his palms.

            “I’m just tired.”

            “There’s a bed in our apartment,” Shion said, after a moment.

            “In Tokyo,” Nezumi said, not lifting his head, so Shion let go of Nezumi’s hand, strung his fingers through Nezumi’s hair.

            “Yeah.” Shion glanced at Safu, but she was looking down at the t-shirt in her hands, the one soaked with Nezumi’s blood.

            Shion loved the smell of Nezumi’s blood, but when it was strong like this, everywhere like this, it just reminded him of the JBVIC, of Nezumi lying on his back with his shirt bunched above his chest, with blood covering his skin and the floor.

            After the transfusions they’d given him after the JBVIC with the blood Nezumi had stolen from the hospital, Nezumi’s blood had smelled like a cocktail of strangers. But now, it just smelled like Nezumi again. Shion wished it still smelled like the strangers.

            Nezumi’s arms slinked around Shion’s waist, held him too loosely. “You don’t want to stay here?” he asked, his voice small.

            Safu looked up, then. Shook her head slightly at Shion.

            Shion knew she wanted Nezumi at her hospital, but there were hospitals in Kyoto, too. Nezumi could get help here, too.

            But the psychiatrists in Kyoto wouldn’t know what Nezumi was going through the way Safu did. Shion and Safu would never be able to explain to the psychiatrists in Kyoto about the JBVIC or Momoe without revealing what Shion was.

            “I want you to come home with me. Can’t we do that?”

            Nezumi lifted his head slowly. Looked at Shion for a long moment. “You’ll stay if we go to Tokyo?”

            Shion tucked Nezumi’s hair behind his ears. He’d missed Nezumi so much, but there was no relief in seeing this Nezumi that looked at him with soft, scared eyes, that smelled too strongly of his own blood.

            “I’ll stay,” Shion promised.

            Nezumi did not look any less scared, but he nodded once, and then Safu was saying they should leave now, a train was boarding to Tokyo in twenty minutes.

            Shion held Nezumi’s hand, didn’t let go even when the man stooped down to put on his boots. As they left his apartment, Nezumi’s hand tightened around Shion’s, nearly crushing his bones, as if he was worried Shion might vanish into thin air if he didn’t hold on.

*

On the train, Nezumi relaxed. He hadn’t been sure if the dead could travel – his family used to refuse to return to Kyoto when Nezumi asked them if they could all go home, and he’d assumed they were simply stuck where they’d appeared.

            But Shion had not disappeared despite being on the train for an hour, was still sitting right there beside him, fingers laced with Nezumi’s own on Shion’s thigh, so Nezumi leaned against him, rested his cheek on Shion’s shoulder, even let himself close his eyes.

            He felt Shion’s chin rub briefly against the top of his head. “Mom will be so happy to see you,” he said. His chin jostled Nezumi’s hair as he spoke.

            “Mmm,” Nezumi hummed. He felt content and warm, and what did it matter if it wouldn’t last? What did Nezumi care about the future? What good had the future ever given him?

            The past had Shion in it, and with Shion back from the dead, his past could be his present, and Nezumi would take that. He’d been an idiot, not to want that in the first place, to think moving on might be the better choice, to think shutting out the past might make him stronger.

            He didn’t want to be strong anymore. He wanted to be warm and he wanted to be weak and he wanted to be taken care of, just for once in his life. He wanted to be loved just a little longer, he wanted to be happy for as long as he would be allowed.

*

Safu called the Uber from the train station in Tokyo while Shion and Nezumi stood against the rails that lined the platform.

            Nezumi leaned against Shion, had been doing so since they’d left Kyoto, as if he wanted to reaffirm Shion’s presence by pressing against him, testing his solidity.

            Either that, or he’d lost enough blood that he felt too weak to stand or sit on his own. Shion didn’t know which was the worse option.

            Nezumi was heavy, but Shion didn’t mind holding his weight. Nezumi held his hand still, and Shion allowed that too. He wanted to be close to Nezumi too, he wanted to touch Nezumi too, but he was scared every time Nezumi looked at him that Nezumi would see his worry, would know something was wrong, would somehow figure out that the plan was to take him to a psychiatric hospital where Shion assumed he would not be allowed to stay with Nezumi while Nezumi got help, whatever that help would entail.

            Shion didn’t know much about what Safu thought Nezumi might need. He didn’t know if Nezumi would have to stay at the hospital overnight under constant supervision, he didn’t know if Nezumi might need to take medication, he didn’t know what was wrong with Nezumi and why he was like this and what could be done.

            He couldn’t imagine what Momoe had done to Nezumi, a man who knew above all else how to survive, a man who spent most of his life moving forward from the horrors of his past, becoming stronger both despite and because of these horrors, taking care of himself on his own since he was a child because there was no one else to do it for him. Shion didn’t understand how Momoe had said things to Nezumi and done things to Nezumi that would change him so drastically into a person who wanted to live in the past so badly he’d hurt himself to have a wisp of it – or what he thought was a wisp of it, because of course Shion was not actually a hallucination, of course he was not really dead, he was not really Nezumi’s past. But Nezumi wouldn’t listen to reason, and it was Momoe’s fault, and Shion almost wished he had not killed her so he could hurt her again and again and again the way she did to Nezumi even beyond the grave.

            He knew, on some level, that even if Momoe was not dead, he would not be able to torture her the way she’d tortured Nezumi. She’d said it himself. _It’s not so easy to torture people if you haven’t done it before._ Shion had been so sure it would be easy, but it hadn’t been. He’d hated it. He was nothing like Momoe, and until this moment, Shion had never thought he’d regret not being capable of inflicting endless, excruciating pain. ~~~~

Shion glanced at Nezumi. Wished he knew as much about psychoanalysis as Safu did, wished he could say some combination of magic words that would take Nezumi’s hurt away and bring the Nezumi Shion knew back.

            There were problems with the Nezumi Shion knew, the Nezumi who forced himself to forget and refused to remember his family and the life he’d lived before the Great Slaughter. There were problems with that Nezumi, who had nightmares each night, who shouted and cried in his sleep when he unconsciously relived the things he refused to acknowledge when awake. There were problems with that Nezumi, who had never even told Shion the names of his parents, of his little sister.

            But at least Shion was aware of those problems. At least he could somewhat understand them. These problems, whatever was happening to Nezumi now, whatever was plaguing him inside his head, Shion didn’t understand them at all, how to help or what to do or how long it might last or what the extent of Nezumi’s hurt was. ~~~~

Nezumi peeked at Shion. “Stop staring at me,” he murmured, ducking his head, pressing his lips briefly to Shion’s shoulder over his jacket.

            Shion took a deep breath, let it out slowly and wished all of his worries would leave his body with his exhale. To Nezumi, he pretended nothing was wrong. “I can’t help myself. I miss you.”

            “You could have come earlier.”

            “I didn’t know where you were.”

            Nezumi lifted his head, looked at Shion for half a minute before replying, quietly, “Yes, you did.”

            Shion didn’t know how to reply to that, didn’t have to know because Safu was walking back over, waving her phone. “One minute. The Uber’s about to turn onto the street, let’s wait at the corner.”

            They headed to the corner, then piled into the Uber when it drove up. Safu sat in the passenger seat, so Nezumi and Shion had the back to themselves, but when Shion slid to one side of the car, Nezumi slid into the middle seat beside him.

            Shion wished he could enjoy that Nezumi was being touchy, was being soft and affectionate and tender, sides of him Shion had seen before, but usually only late at night or early in the morning, usually only when he was tired or drunk or they were alone, and only for brief snippets of time. Especially after a month of not seeing him, Shion wished he could just take these parts of Nezumi, wished he didn’t question them, wished he wasn’t terrified of them.

            He wanted his Nezumi back. He wanted the Nezumi that was sharp with dry humor, that was hard edges and dramatic and didn’t offer his smiles easily so that when he did, Shion knew he’d earned them. He wanted the Nezumi full of turmoil and storms, who could be moody and irritated and made Shion insanely aggravated in a way no one ever had before. He wanted the Nezumi that was difficult, threw tantrums like a child, then lectured Shion like he was the one who was childish. He wanted the Nezumi with tangible anger, hot and cold in flashes of a second, sullen and temperamental and full of loathing and betrayal and nightmares and the worst things a person could be full of.

            The Nezumi who was cold but who’d warmed to Shion. The Nezumi who was wary but trusted Shion. The Nezumi who was distant but touchy with Shion. The Nezumi who was gentle in moments Shion could never guess, in a way that would always surprise him, make his skin warm, make his heart melt because he knew it was hard for Nezumi to let his guard down, to show this side of himself, to show Shion that he was full of not only the worst things a person could be full of, but the best things too, like laughter and lust and passion and mystery and intelligence and devotion and loyalty and happiness and love.

            The Nezumi beside him in the Uber did not seem full of anything.

            “This isn’t the way to the apartment,” Nezumi said, lifting his head from Shion’s shoulder and leaning forward to look past Shion out the window.

            “We have to make a stop first,” Safu said.

            “Where?” Nezumi asked, looking at Shion in a way he never used to look at Shion, without any intensity or focus.

            “Just a work thing,” Safu said easily, and Nezumi didn’t question her further.

            Shion had been to Safu’s psychiatric hospital only twice before, both times to meet Safu for lunch on the occasional day she was there instead of her lab. He’d never been inside, only by the entrance. So when the Uber arrived and they walked inside, he was relieved to see it looked nothing like the psych wards in movies.

            It looked, more or less, like an ordinary hospital.

            “This is where you work?” Nezumi asked, as they followed her across the lobby and down a hallway.

            Shion wasn’t sure where Safu was taking them. He didn’t know what was supposed to happen next, but Safu seemed confident, at ease.

            “Occasionally. Mainly, practicing psychiatrists work here with patients. I don’t have much patient contact, other than for research trials. I haven’t facilitated a trial in about a year now, so it’s been a bit since I’ve been in here, but I know my way around. I did much more trials at the beginning stages of my research.”

            “And what is your research, exactly?” Nezumi asked, looking down the halls they passed.

            Shion himself was trying to see through the doors into the rooms. Some of them had thin windows down their left sides, and Shion wanted to catch a glimpse of the patients, see if any of them looked like Nezumi, had those same hazy eyes and that same light smile.

            “Psychoanalysis, specifically cognitive processes and conscious and unconscious mental processes,” Safu replied, leading them down another hall.

            Nezumi hummed and didn’t ask any more questions, and after a minute of silence, Safu stopped.

            She took her wallet from her purse, freed a card from it, and slid the card into a slot on the side of the door. The door unlocked, and Safu opened it.

            “Come on in,” Safu said, holding the door open for them.

            “Why are we here again?” Nezumi asked.

            Shion was still holding Nezumi’s hand and pulled Nezumi gently inside.   

            The room looked like an examination room at a general practitioner’s office. There was a cot with thin paper spread over it in a strip. There was a sink to the side with cabinets around it and a stool in front of it. There were posters on the wall, some with diagrams of brains, others with charts filled with words Shion was distracted from reading by Safu’s voice.

            “Shion, you should wait outside,” she said, still holding open the door.

            Shion stared at her, and Nezumi spoke the question Shion was about to ask.

            “Why?”

            “I want to talk to you,” Safu said, looking calmly at Nezumi.

            Shion let go of Nezumi’s hand, but Nezumi didn’t let go of his.

            “It’s okay,” Shion said gently, even though he wanted to stay, to hear whatever Safu told Nezumi, to hear whatever Nezumi said back, to understand what was happening, to understand the blood in the tub and in the sink and on the knife and soaking Nezumi’s hand and the t-shirt wrapped around it.

            “Talk to me about what? Why here?” Nezumi asked. His hand tightened around Shion’s with each word. Shion felt his bones jostle against each other.

            “Ow, ah, can you loosen your grip?” Shion asked. “It’s starting to hurt.”

            “You can’t get hurt,” Nezumi said, dismissively, not even looking at Shion.

            “I want to talk to you about what happened to your hand. Shion won’t go anywhere, he’ll just be right outside the room.”

            “Nothing happened to my hand,” Nezumi said, voice hardening, grip tightening around Shion’s own hand.

            “Nezumi,” Shion murmured, trying to pry Nezumi’s fingers from his own with his free hand. “You’re going to break my hand.”

            “This is a voluntary hospital. We’re not allowed to keep you here against your will. You have to choose to be here, you have to choose to get help.”

            “I don’t need help,” Nezumi snapped. He turned to Shion, but he didn’t look as angry as his voice sounded. He looked terrified. “Why are you doing this? I told you it was an accident, you said you weren’t mad.”

            “I’m not mad,” Shion insisted. Pain was shooting up his arm from his hand. “I’m not going anywhere, I just want you to feel better.”

            “I feel fine,” Nezumi said tightly. His eyes were wet. His fingernails dug into Shion’s skin while he squeezed.

            “You’re going to break my hand, Nezumi.”

            “I can’t break your hand, you’re not fucking real!” Nezumi shouted, letting go of Shion’s hand as he did so, pressing his bases of his palms to his eyes and turning around, stepping away from Shion and Safu and facing the wall.

            Shion rubbed his hand, but he almost wished Nezumi was still squeezing it. The pain would have been a distraction from this, from Nezumi, from everything that was happening, from the smell of Nezumi’s blood, so so strong when it shouldn’t have been.

            “Nezumi,” Safu said quietly, stepping closer to him.

            Nezumi dropped his hands from his face, pressed them against the wall in front of him and hung his head, his hair falling over his cheeks. He didn’t lift his head or turn around even when he spoke, his voice quiet now.

            “I’m so tired, Safu. I’m so tired of fighting, moving on, surviving. I know I’m fucked up. I know, you think I don’t know? After all the shit I’ve been through, I’m not allowed to be fucked up? Just let me have this for as long as it lasts.”

            “I don’t want to take away your hallucinations. I promise you, I will not take Shion away from you. I just want to talk to you about what happened to your hand, that’s all.”

            Shion didn’t know how Safu could stay composed as she was. He wrapped his arms around himself, uncertain he could keep himself together no matter how tightly he squeezed.

            “Shion,” Safu said quietly, nodding to the door, and Shion glanced at Nezumi, but he still didn’t lift his head or turn away from the wall, so Shion stepped back slowly, then again, then was beside the open door.

            Even when he stepped out the door, Nezumi didn’t look at him. Shion thought about saying something, then decided against it, caught the handle of the door and pulled it closed.

            He stood against the closed door for a minute before his phone vibrated, and he took it out his pocket. He had a text from Safu.

            _Don’t wait for us. He’s going to need to stay here for a while. I’ll text you later._

            Shion didn’t know how Safu was going to convince Nezumi to stay, but he didn’t doubt her. He pressed his hand against the closed door, but there were no windows on this one, so he couldn’t look inside to see Nezumi.

            He wished he’d said something to Nezumi before he’d left the room, but he knew better than to go back in. The door was locked anyway, so he stepped away from it, let his hand slip off the surface, and walked away.

            This was not how things were supposed to happen when Nezumi came back. Finding Nezumi and bringing him back to Tokyo was supposed to be a good thing, a happy thing. They were supposed to finally have a chance at a life together.

            Maybe that had just been a human want all along. Maybe Shion had been a fool to think he’d ever have that, a simple, good life with the human he loved more than any other.

*

Safu made Nezumi sleep in a different room than the first one, one with a bed and nothing else at all, not even blinds over the single window. There were restraining straps hanging off the bed, but she didn’t tie him down.

            Instead, she said, “If you don’t hurt yourself, I’ll let Shion come back tomorrow to visit you.”

            That was not how it worked, of course, but Nezumi did not expect Safu to know how to bring back the dead, even though he’d explained it to her many times, as she’d spent the day asking him about his hand, about the _hallucinations_ , as she called them.

            Nezumi supposed they were hallucinations, though he’d never thought of the dead in that way. He didn’t think Shion was a ghost – he was well aware that Shion was just a figment of his own mind – but to call Shion a hallucination made Nezumi think she was calling him crazy.

            Maybe he was. He was in a psych ward, after all, and Safu told him many times that he could leave whenever he wanted, but he didn’t have anywhere else he wanted to go.

            Shion appeared only when Safu was present, so Nezumi figured it was best just to stick around here, since that was where Safu would be.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure if Safu was a _hallucination_ as well. He didn’t care. He didn’t care to assess his present, where he was or whom he was with, what he was doing. The present didn’t matter, and neither did the future.

            It was the past that Nezumi wanted, so after being questioned by Safu all day, he sat on the edge of his bed and picked up the restraining strap that hung from the side of it, trying to figure out a way to hurt himself with it as swiftly and seriously as possible so that he could bring his past back.

*

Safu didn’t let Shion visit Nezumi the next day, Monday morning, even though she’d said she would.

            “He wants to see me too! You told him yourself, you promised him you wouldn’t keep me away from him, aren’t you supposed to be earning his trust? Isn’t that the only way therapy can work?” Shion demanded. He stood in front of the room Nezumi had been taken to the day before, which he’d run to even when Safu told him in the lobby he couldn’t see Nezumi that day.

            But Nezumi was no longer in this room, and Safu wouldn’t tell Shion where he was now.

            “You’re right, but he has to earn my trust too, and he didn’t,” Safu said calmly.

            “What does that even mean? He’s sick and confused, you can’t isolate him!”

            “I’m not isolating him, I would be talking to him right now if you weren’t out here shouting at me. Let me do my job, Shion. You’re not good for him right now, you’ll make things worse if you see him today.”

            Shion debated arguing further, but he didn’t want Nezumi to be alone in this place longer than he had to be. “Before I go, at least tell me how he is. Did he try to hurt himself again?”

            Safu hesitated, which was a clear enough answer in itself.

            “But you stopped him. Because you have him under twenty-four-hour supervision, right?” Shion pressed.

            Safu sighed. “He was under constant video camera surveillance at the JBVIC, he had no privacy there, he was a prisoner. I don’t want to replicate his conditions here, make him feel like he’s trapped here the way he was there. He needs some freedom, he needs to be allowed to make his own decisions – ”

            “When his decisions are to hurt himself, no, I don’t think he actually should be allowed to do that!” Shion shouted, his skin heating up, his hands turning to fists.

            “Shion, I know you’re upset – ”

            Shion was more than upset. His rage filled his entire body so that he was shaking with it. “You’re supposed to be his friend! He’s not some fascinating addition to your collection of research subjects that you can just – ”

            “I don’t want Nezumi to get hurt, I’m fully aware he’s not an experiment, I’m not the villain here! The only way Nezumi will get better is if he understands that making the decision not to hurt himself is the only way he can see you again. It’s painful for me to see him hurt himself too, but I have to remain professional, I have to use the methods I know to help him get out of this harmful mindset Momoe put him in, and honestly, you don’t know a thing about that, so don’t lecture me, don’t tell me I don’t care about him. Now please leave, I need to get back to work. If you won’t leave on your own, I’ll have people escort you out.”

            “Just tell me what he did to himself,” Shion pressed. “Did he cut himself again? Why does he even have access to knives?” Shion heard himself get hysterical when he’d meant to speak calmly, to match Safu’s controlled demeanor, to show her he could be trusted with information on Nezumi’s condition.

            “I’m asking you to leave, Shion, I won’t ask again,” Safu said firmly.

            “You won’t even tell me how hurt he is?” Shion yelled, his voice breaking down the middle, and he rubbed his hands hard over his eyes, sniffed loudly, refused to look away from Safu.

            Safu’s expression softened. “He’s okay, it’s nothing serious. I’ll text you when you can come see him again, okay? I know this is hard, but you have to trust me.”

            “Anything he does to himself is serious to me,” Shion argued. He pressed his hands to his face as if he could hide his tears from Safu, as if he could pretend he was still composed.

            “I know. Me too,” Safu said quietly, and Shion felt her hug him, didn’t push away from her even though a part of him wanted to, a part of him hated her in that moment for being the reason he couldn’t see Nezumi. “Did you talk to Karan about all this?”

            Shion shook his head. Safu released him, and he lowered his hands from his face, took the tissue Safu held out for him though he didn’t know where she’d gotten it from.

            Maybe a pocket of her lab coat. Maybe her pockets were filled with tissues, maybe they were meant to be for Nezumi, and Shion wondered if Nezumi had cried here last night, if he was sad, if he felt alone and abandoned and confused as to why Shion wasn’t with him when Shion had promised he would stay.

            “I told her we brought him back from Kyoto, and that he’s going to be here for a while getting help from you. I didn’t tell her about, about his hand or the knife or the blood, about any of that,” Shion mumbled, after blowing his nose.

             Safu nodded, glanced behind her shoulder, looked back at Shion. “I really should go. He’ll be waiting for me.”

            Shion caught her wrist before she could walk away from him.

            “Shion – ”

            “Wait, just – I understand why I can’t see him, I get that it will make him think I’m only there because he – he hurt himself again. But – Could I talk to him on the phone? I just want to talk to him.”

            “That’s not a good idea,” Safu said slowly.  

            “What about letters? If I wrote him a letter, would you give it to him?”

            Safu looked at Shion carefully. “I’ll consider it.”

            “Are you at least giving him books to read? He loves to read,” Shion continued, as if Safu didn’t know Nezumi, as if Safu was a stranger to him.

            “I do give him books, but I have to take them away when I leave him alone. He could use the pages to…well,” Safu’s voice dropped away, but Shion didn’t need her to elaborate.

             “But do you have a good enough library? I’ll check out some books for him that I know he likes, I’ll bring them here, you’ll let him read those, right?”

            Safu’s shoulders fell as she sighed. “Yes, if you bring books, I’ll give them to him.”

            “And is he eating? He’s not starving himself, is he? I know you want him to have free will, but you can’t let him starve himself.”

            “Shion, listen to me, I’m taking care of him. This is a hospital, we do want our patients to be healthy.”

            It was strange to think of Nezumi as a patient. But then, everything that had happened since Halloween was strange. Almost unreal. Almost impossible.

            “You have to let me go now. I’m not trying to keep anything from you, I’ll call you tonight, and I’ll answer any question you have about him. But right now, he’s waiting, and you’re right, I have to establish trust between us, I can’t just leave him alone in his room when I told him I’d be right back.”

            Shion tightened his hand around Safu’s wrist even though he meant to let her go. “You can’t just tell me what he did to himself?” he pressed. He heard his own voice, the desperation in it.

            Safu’s eyebrows creased. “Shion. I’m telling you as my best friend that it’s not good for you to know the details of this. I want to help Nezumi, but I want to help you too. I’m not going to tell you. Please let go of me now.”

            Shion tightened his grip for a second, then let go. His hand was still sore from Nezumi’s grip the day before, and he flexed his fingers while Safu gave him another quick hug before disappearing down the hallway to wherever she was keeping Nezumi.

            Shion could have followed, could have barged into whatever room she was keeping him in, but he’d already done enough damage to Nezumi. He understood very well that Nezumi was safest without him.

*


	33. Chapter 33

_Nezumi,_

_I was thinking today about how it was when we first met, how you didn’t know I was a vamp, how my worst fears back then were that you might find out the truth about me. It seems like such a silly fear now, but at the time, it was so terrifying. I guess the real fear was that finding out the truth would take you away from me._

_My worst fear, I think, is the same now. That you’ll be gone from me, that you’ll take yourself away from me again. I’m trying to be positive because sometimes when my worst fears are fulfilled, the result is not as bad as I expected – you loved me still, after you found out the truth, even though it took about a month for you to speak to me again. A month is not such a long time, even though a lot of months since I’ve known you have felt like lifetimes._

_I’ve lived a lot of lifetimes with you, and I never regretted any of them until now._

_I go back and forth in my head. In some moments, I wish we never met. Others, I remember what my life was before you. It wasn’t nearly so heartbreaking, but it wasn’t really a life either. I didn’t know just how fully I could live before you. I didn’t understand my own capacity to love._

_I know you think I’m dead right now, and nothing I say in this letter can change your mind on that. And I know how scary it must feel for you because I thought you were dead, too, after I found you in that room in the JBVIC. I would have hurt myself, too, if I thought it meant I could see you again. I understand you, Nezumi. I hate everything you’re doing, but I understand it, too._

_I’m not mad at you. I guess I’m just sad. It’s hard to remember a time when we were ever really happy, but I know we had a few months – a lifetime of itself – of that, too._

_I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait to see you again. Maybe it’ll be tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be next week. Maybe it will be a month, or more than that._

_However long it is, I know that it will feel like the longest lifetime I’ve ever had to live. You don’t believe I’m alive, but I am, which means I have to endure this span of time in which I know you’re hurting yourself in the hope that pain is what will make you see me again. What a horrifying thought, that only pain will bring me to you. I hate you a little, for thinking that. I know that to hate you is not fair, but it’s not fair what you’re doing to me, either. You always did call me petty, and I guess you were right._

_If you want me to stop hating you – which I am eager to stop as well – you could consider the idea that not only pain will bring me to you. Maybe, I can be brought back to you by a good thing. Maybe you could take a chance at that, so we can start a new lifetime, any other one but this one we’re stuck in right now. We’ve had a lot of bad lifetimes recently, so I think we’re due for a good one._

_I’ll do the best I can to endure this lifetime for the chance of a better one with you. I’ll do the best I can not to lose hope. If I’ve learned anything from knowing you, it’s that things can always get worse, but they can always get unbelievably better, too._

_I don’t need unbelievably better. All I really want is to kiss you again, to touch you. It’s what I’ve wanted since I’ve known you, and at the beginning and some parts in the middle it was an impossible want, but other times it was the easiest want in the world because I knew you wanted it too. If that’s what you want, Nezumi, right at this moment, then there is no reason you shouldn’t have it. I am yours, and I am waiting._

_You’re my family, and I love you beyond words._

_-Shion_

*

_Shion._

_Your worst fear when we first met was that I’d find out your secret. My worst fear was you._

_You had a smile that stuck in my head when nothing else and no one else had stuck for twenty years. I’m still scared of you. Scarier than the thought of you dead is the thought that I’ll never be able to shake you out of my head. That I’ll be able to remember you always even when I can’t stand it, but I won’t be able to see you or talk to you or touch you or be with you._

_So why won’t you come back? Safu says Momoe’s psychological warfare was rooted in fear, in conjuring past fears and making them present fears, in turning fear into a cycle so it’s never gone. Safu says Momoe morphed fear with love so it feels like one can’t exist without the other, so it becomes impossible to feel one without the other. She’s got experts on Momoe here, if you can believe it. They know all about her here, or so they say._

_I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true, but I know that I loved you, and I know it scared me to do so, even before whatever Momoe did to me. I was probably an easy target for her. Maybe that’s why I’m so fucked up now._

_You’re in my head all the time so I don’t know why you can’t just be here with me. I must be crazy, since Safu’s got me here in this pscyh ward and insists on spending twelve hours a day having me talk about everything that’s ever happened to me in my life – so if I’m crazy why can’t I just conjure you into this room with me? What good is a letter? I don’t want a letter. I can’t even keep a letter cause Safu says I could slit my wrists with it. She doesn’t seem to understand that the letter is part of the hallucination, or she does understand and she’s playing some mind game on me, or something else, I don’t know, I don’t care._

_Safu says I can leave whenever I want. I can go home and you’ll be there, in that apartment we got together. If I just do that, she says, I could be happy and resume my life again._

_But I don’t think I’ll leave. It should be easy enough to go irrefutably crazy in here, in this empty room with only Safu to talk to and only my past to talk about. Hopefully, I’ll soon get to the point of crazy where instead of a getting a goddamn letter I get you._

_You don’t want me to hurt myself, but you’re not fucking real. Nothing is fucking real. I don’t feel like myself and Safu wants me to start these meds but I worry they’ll take you out of my head for good. And even though I just said you being in my head is the worst possible thing, you being out of it will probably suck more. And I don’t really want to imagine a world in which things somehow suck more._

_I’m tired. Safu’s worried I’ll kill myself, but there’d be no point to that. I doubt I could die if I tried to. And if I did die, it’d probably feel the same as it does now. Just a bunch of nothing and not knowing and not feeling._

_-N_

*

_Nezumi,_

_I thought for a while I wouldn’t write you another letter because if I wrote you another letter, it’d be more likely that you’d write another letter in response, and I don’t know if I could handle that. Your last letter was very hard to read. Partly your atrocious handwriting, but mostly the words you wrote. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but it sounds really horrible. I hope you are taking the medication Safu asked you to take. I don’t know how to feel about the idea of you on medication, but if it helps you, then that’s what I want. That’s all I want._

_Safu hasn’t let me see you in the two weeks you’ve been there, and I know that means you haven’t stopped hurting yourself. I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do so you’ll stop, Nezumi, and I’ll do it._

_You’re stuck in my head too, you know. You did this to me, too, you consumed me, too, it’s not just you who has to remember and not get to see or touch or talk to or live with. It’s me too, I’m alone too. I’m so angry, I said I wasn’t angry in the first letter, but now I am. This is the tenth letter I’ve tried to write to you, and each time I end up getting so angry I just write curses or shout at you and then crumple the letter or rip it up._

_If you’re going to write back, don’t send me such a shitty letter. And this letter is shitty, I get that, but you deserve it for what you sent me. Talking about killing yourself so casually, even when you say you won’t do it – how dare you even think of it? Who are you? Not the man I fell in love with. Not the man I can’t move on from – and I’ve tried, don’t think I haven’t tried. If you’re not even going to try to get better, I don’t know why I should bother waiting for you._

_-S_

*

_Nezumi,_

_I told Safu not to give you that letter, but she said she already did. I’m sorry. I hope it doesn’t hurt your progress. I hope it didn’t upset you. None of this is your fault, I know that. Please get better and come home. I miss you, and despite what I may have said in that terrible letter – I don’t fully remember – I am waiting for you._

_-Shion_

_*_

_Nezumi,_

_You haven’t written back, maybe because that letter I sent you berated you for the letter you sent me? Well, even if it’s hard to read, I still would like to hear from you._

_Safu says she’s hopeful, so I’m trying to be hopeful too. It’s strange to think it’s been almost a month that you’ve been in there. I don’t like the thought of you spending your Christmas in there. I don’t want you to be in there on New Years’ Eve. Mom misses you in the bakery. The costumers miss your icing skills. Kage misses you at the theater, he texts me sometimes to get updates on you._

_I miss all of you._

_-Shion_

_*_

_Professor._

_Safu probably told you that I’ve started taking anti-depressants for a little while now. It’s interesting because I didn’t think I was depressed. I asked her why she didn’t give me anti-hallucinogenics, and she said because I never was hallucinating in the first place. Which is something a hallucination would likely say, don’t you think? That girl can’t pull one over me._

_On the meds, I feel more myself and less myself at the same time. The biggest change is I’m less content to sit around and do nothing. Your second letter was a bit rude, but at least it was somewhat long and distracting. The next two were very short. A waste of paper, really._

_It’s Christmas, and I’m in here, which you mentioned you didn’t like the thought of – well, I don’t like the thought of it either. Safu gave me your gift, it’s not very practical as I don’t even know how to knit, and I’m not allowed to keep it because knitting needles are a danger to myself, but thanks all the same. The sentiment, as I understand it, was so I don’t bore myself to death here, or so I could be productive and make something while I’m here, like a scarf or some shit, but really, have I ever seemed like the knitting type to you?_

_I didn’t get you anything, but I don’t think that’s entirely my fault. The psych ward doesn’t even have a gift shop. If it did, I doubt Safu would allow me in it. And if she did, all they’d have would probably be t-shirts with stupid punny sayings like,_ “I’m with crazy,” _which I’m sure you’d never wear because you would get all up in a huff about the idea of calling me crazy. Even though I am. Clearly. Seeing as I’m contemplating buying a hallucination a goddamn t-shirt._

_Safu still says I can leave whenever I want, and I’ve been thinking of leaving. It’s dull in here now that time feels more tangible (Safu says that’s the anti-depressants at work) and boring despite your knitting supplies, and anyway, I know New Years’ Eve is a huge rush at the bakery. Karan could probably use an extra set of hands, right? Especially since you’re dead. And if I’m in here, Safu will likely be here too, watching me to make sure I don’t slip a chopstick from lunch up my sleeve to sharpen in my room and stab myself with. Not that I’d bother with that again, as obviously, it didn’t work the first time, seeing as we’re still on letter terms, instead of speaking face-to-face._

_I don’t know what Safu tells you. She says everything I say to her in our sessions is confidential, but really, I don’t care if she tells you what I say. It’s nothing riveting, mostly just what my life was like between the Great Slaughter and meeting you. Which was pretty uneventful. She also asks a lot about Momoe and what happened in the JBVIC – more eventful, but after talking about it for nearly a month, I’m pretty done with the subject._

_She asks about my thoughts on you, too, and if I’m still so certain you died when I have no evidence of it. Typical she would ask about evidence, you used to be obsessed with evidence too, remember? It’s how you got me to go out with you after your lecture that first time we ever talked, saying all the evidence pointed to some notion in your head that I was into you. Ridiculous. I still wonder how you got to be so cocky when you never even kissed a guy until your late twenties._

_I don’t have any concrete evidence that you’re dead. Is that supposed to mean you’re not dead? What am I supposed to have, a body? It’s not like I can do detective work from a psych ward. All I have is the feeling of it, of your death, I mean, but since taking the anti-depressants, that feeling has been becoming a little unsolidified. I increasingly don’t know what to think, but it feels safest to say you’re a hallucination – an absent one, since I haven’t seen you in some time – and the letters are part of the hallucination – a disappointing part, since they’re recently short and berating._

_The other evidence I have, however flimsy to Safu it seems, is my past. Everyone I’ve loved has died. Why shouldn’t you? What makes you so special to stick around? If anything, you’re the least likely to survive out of anyone I could have fallen for. You’re the one most prone to starve, or to be hunted. To think I could have you forever, if you look at the evidence, is kind of a stupid fantasy._

_I’m still trying to see you, but Safu’s made it much more difficult to hurt myself. I mostly rely on hitting different parts of my body against the wall, so I’m a bit covered in bruises. I contemplated pulling out my hair, but you like my hair, and if that worked and you came back after I pulled out a good hunk of it, I know you’d be upset and carry on about it. The thing is, it would have been nice to see you today, what with it being a holiday and all, but Safu’s got me on full watch. She threatened to restrain me on one of those restraining beds, but she hasn’t done it yet, so fingers crossed she’ll keep trusting me to make better decisions tomorrow._

_Anyway, since I probably won’t see you, and I don’t have a gift for you, I figured I’d write you a letter. If there’s any chance you are alive (doubtful), I know you’ll be cranky if I don’t at the very least wish you Merry Christmas._

_So, Merry Christmas, Shion._

_*_

_Nezumi,_

_Hi. I have to confess, you got my hopes up with your last letter. You seemed so much more like yourself, and then you said you’d try to be at the bakery on New Years’ Eve, and I really thought I’d get to see you again. But you didn’t come._

_Safu told me why not._

_Your Christmas letter was just so promising, I thought… Safu said sometimes it’s like that, especially with new medications. There are ups and downs._

_She still won’t let me see you. If you keep doing this to yourself, if you keep hurting yourself, I’ll never get to see you again, Nezumi. You have to stop this. You tried it, you tried hurting yourself over and over again – clearly, you hurt yourself badly enough on New Years’ Eve to have “summoned me” if pain was really the way to do it. Can’t you see it’s not working? Can’t you just stop for one day, so I can see you again?_

_Or do you hurt yourself now for a different reason? Is it just habit now, or does it feel good, is it some kind of relief, and a desire to see me is just an excuse?_

_I should go now. I know you said you wanted longer letters, but I don’t know what else to say. I don’t want to risk getting upset with you. I don’t want you to think I’m mad at you for giving me false hope because I know you didn’t mean to. I don’t want to get mad at you for hurting yourself because I know it’s not your fault. At least, that’s what Safu keeps telling me. Is it Momoe’s fault? Because she’s dead, Nezumi, she’s gone, I killed her, you know that, right? I broke the legs off one of the bakery chairs and plunged them into her wrists and right through her heart. It was horrifying, but I’ve barely even processed it because you’ve been missing ever since, and all I can think about is you._

_How strange it that. I killed someone, and I barely even think of it. When I do think of it, it’s without remorse. She was a monster, and she did terrible things to you._

_But right now, it’s not her doing these things to you. Maybe she altered your mental state with her psychological warfare, but I don’t know how to put all of the blame on her for the way we’re living now. If you kill yourself – and I’ve forced myself to think about it as a real possibility since New Years’ Eve – is it Momoe who killed you? Because if we’re just looking at cause-and-effect, then really, it’s me who killed you. Because I’m the reason you ever met Momoe in the first place._

_Right?_

_Isn’t that right?_

_Don’t make me kill you, Nezumi. I killed Momoe and I know I can get over that even once it’s had a chance to sink in, but I’ll never be able to get over your death, I can tell you that from now. My life is supposed to be horrible because I’m a vamp and we’re meant to live in misery, but you got me used to being happy, you made me want things I never let myself want before, you gave me a life only a human could have. Don’t think you can take all that away from me now._

_I’m frustrated, Nezumi. I’m beyond frustrated. It’s an easier thing to feel than sad, so I’ve decided I’d let myself wallow in my anger instead of anything else I could be feeling. I need you to get better. I need you to get past this, and I know you can, you’ve recovered from everything you’ve ever had to endure in your life, so you can recover from this. You can. You have to._

_-Shion_

*

_Professor._

_Looks like we’ve gotten to that point. I’ve not only lost my pen and paper privileges, but I’m now strapped to one of these restraining psych beds in the fulfillment of what I was certain was Safu’s empty threat. She tells me now I’m not even allowed to leave this crazy house if I wanted to._

_So I finally wore her down. All it took was biting through the skin of my wrists. If only I’d known that at the beginning. (By the way, my blood doesn’t taste as good as you said it did. Was that false flattery? I don’t like being lied to, professor, especially about how delicious you vamps find my blood.)_

_As you may have guessed, Safu is writing this letter, which I’m dictating to her (see second sentence for reasons why it’s gotten a tad difficult for me to write it myself). You know what that means – letter sex. Like phone sex, but with much slower rates of gratification. Even so, I think we should still try to synchronize our climaxes. I’m up for the challenge if you are._

_Safu insists she’ll write whatever I say to her, word-for-word, but she used to insist I was not a prisoner in this goddamn psych ward, and clearly, that’s no longer the case. How much graphic letter sex do you think she’ll be able to handle before she rescinds that promise too? Let’s find out together, shall we?_

_Let’s see. Well, obviously we’re in prime positions for some BDSM, seeing as I’ve already got my arms strapped down pretty tightly. Step 1 complete. Step 2, you straddle my face and unzip your jeans and take out your cock and shove it in my watering mouth. Make that a throbbing, swollen, bleach-haired, pre-cum-leaking cock. Is Safu writing these details?_

_Oh, wow, she just showed me, she wrote all the details. So professional, let’s continue then. I’ll be good to you – your cock is huge. I’m like, gagging on it and that good porn shit. A monster cock. Maybe Safu’s seen it before when you guys were kids and took baths together? Well, I can assure her, it’s grown since then. You could kill a man with that thing. You probably have. Biggest cock in all of the land._

_Safu’s telling me I’m talking too fast, but the real problem is you’re fucking my face too fast. You’re on all fours and I’m on my back and your killer cock is deep down my throat and I can barely breathe from it and my jaw is sore and your balls are slapping my chin with each violent thrust and your hand is tightening in my hair, pushing my head down into the mattress. You reach down and take my hand and guide my fingers into your – Wait. Fuck. My arms are strapped down. Fuck, I forgot. Well, I guess you’ll have to finger fuck your own ass, I don’t make the rules._

_I will tell you this, Safu is writing all this with a straight face, she always did impress me. Unless she’s veering off script – I’m sure she’ll show me the letter as proof she did not, not that I’ll remember every word I dictated to her. How many times have I said cum? She says only one time. That seems off, I’m certain I’ve mentioned my mouth filling so much with it that it drips out my lips down the sides of my face and stains her pillowcase. Good news is in this crazy house I don’t have to do my own laundry. Should have moved in here months ago. Where else can a person get such luxuries without having to pay a dime?_

_Wait a second, take your cock out of my mouth for a minute, how the fuck am I paying for this? Psych wards aren’t free and neither are meds, and I’ve been here for over a month. Are you paying off my bills? Don’t you dare be paying off my bills – Safu, how am I supposed to pay for this? Are you still writing this down? Don’t write this down it’s not part of the goddamn letter._

_Okay, I’m back (not that I went anywhere), and payments are all sorted out. I’m sure you’re aware that Safu’s pretending I’m a research subject so all my care and meds and cum-stained pillowcase washing is paid for by her research lab. How shrewd of her._

_I think I’m done with the letter sex, to be honest. Safu is clearly unfazed, and it’s not like I can even jerk myself off with my arms strapped down. Unless – Safu, want to give me a hand? She shook her head no. Great friend she is._

_I can picture you, professor, seething wherever you are when you read this. Wondering why the hell I’m talking about your monster cock when I should be – What? Apologizing? Taking the blame for all the shit I’m putting you through, according to your most recent letter? It was lovely, by the way. Really made me feel fuzzy inside._

_I would apologize, but you’re the asshole who didn’t even show up. You know how much it hurts to bite through the skin of your own wrists? You ever tried that shit? Both wrists, mind you. Takes some dedication, I’m not blessed with those sharp vamp teeth of yours, if you’ll recall._

_What do you want from me, Shion? What do I have to do? And don’t say stop hurting myself, that’s such bullshit. If, by chance, you’re not dead, and you’re not a hallucination, then what the hell are you doing, writing me letters, waiting for me?_

_Get over me, Shion. Can’t you see I’m too fucked up to ever recover? Can’t you see it’s all caught up to me, all the shit my life has been, and I’ll never be the guy you want me to be again? Can’t you see it’s too late now? There’s no going back. There’s no more lifetimes for us but this one, this shitty, horrifying one._

_It’s such a nicer thought to think of you as a hallucination because if you’re somehow alive, if I’ve put you through all this shit, if you’re still really waiting for me, that’s just sad. That’s worse than any crazy I could be. Your mind is so much more fucked up than mine, and you don’t even have the good excuse of Momoe the Torturer’s influence._

_Even a vamp deserves better than this. Stop waiting for me. Don’t make me responsible for ruining your whole life, making you wait for a guy who’s lost his mind._

_And I have lost it, you know, my mind. No matter what Safu tries. No matter what meds she gives me. I’ve realized it’s pretty comforting to be fucked up in the head. To be strapped down in this psych ward where they’ll even do my laundry. I’ve gotten good at psychoanalysis after listening to Safu’s crap all day long for a month, so let’s give it a go – my childhood was taken away from me when I was seven, so to be here, to be taken care of and get to do absolutely nothing and to be fed and have a place to sleep without having to worry about anything at all is like my childhood given back to me. How’s that? Sounds like some good psychobabble to me. Right, Safu?_

_She didn’t reply, but I know she silently is very impressed._

_And maybe you’re thinking, what about all that shit I used to spew about not giving up and self-pity being for assholes and whatever else I said? I don’t know, I really was on my high horse quite a bit though, I’m sure you remember. Well, none of that macho survival mindset got me anywhere. It just got me here. Best to ditch it. Best to realize my life really isn’t up to me at all. And things don’t get better even if I try my hardest._

_And what about you, you’re thinking. What about how much I love you? Let me remind you, professor, that you’re dead. And if you’re not, you don’t want me like this. I’m doing you a favor, getting myself strapped to this bed, away from you._

_I’m freeing you, professor. Impress some other men with that monster cock of yours. Give up on me. I have._

_-N_

_*_

_Nezumi,_

_Are you done yet? If you’re not, don’t bother writing me another letter until you get over this self-pity facade. It doesn’t suit you._

_And I actually did enjoy the letter sex, believe it or not. If you’re going to write another word to me, it better be about my dick in your mouth and not about you giving up on yourself and telling me I might as well do the same. You’re so dramatic, you think you can tell me you’ve changed? You’ve always been too dramatic for your own good._

_That last letter was full of shit. And it was long. So now you’re the one wasting paper. And my time, which I don’t have an excess of, as classes just started for the new semester, and I’m busy. When you write to me again, don’t waste my time with that crap. I know you don’t believe a word of it. I know you only told me to move on because you’re scared once you get out of there, I won’t want you anymore, I won’t actually be waiting any longer, and you’re giving yourself a security blanket, telling me to get lost so if on the off chance that I do get lost, it’ll be because you told me to and not because I chose to on my own volition._

_I know you, Nezumi. I know everything you’re up to, I know everything you’re thinking. I know you’ll never give up on yourself, and you’ll never give up on me, so do me a favor and give me the same benefit of the doubt._

_I’ll never give up on you. No one else will ever get this monster cock. Don’t forget it._

_Yours,_

_Shion_

*

_Professor._

_I’ll say this – your letter made me laugh, and it’s been a while since I’ve done that. “No one else will ever get this monster cock.” I still think about that and chuckle to myself at times, which brightens up my dull existence here, so thanks for that. I forgot you could be funny._

_That’s a lie. I didn’t forget. Guess I’m full of lies lately, but apparently, you know when I’m lying, so it really doesn’t matter if I lie or not._

_Okay, okay, you win, I’ll stop with the “give up on me” shit. It annoyed me to say it too, by the way. I thought I was doing us all a favor, but I forgot how stubborn you could be, how stoically you refuse to be wrong._

_Another lie. I haven’t forgotten those parts of you either._

_I’m sure Safu has told you, I’m no longer being restrained. Hurrah. I’m even writing my own letters again, as I’m sure you can tell from the handwriting. Letter sex won’t be as fun without Safu there to witness it, so I’ll refrain. I think you were joking when you said you enjoyed it, anyway. Although I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes, I can never guess with you._

_Anyway, it’s been a little over a week (eleven days) since I’ve done anything to myself. I don’t actually know if you know that. The deal was supposed to be that I go twenty-four hours without injury, and Safu lets you see me. But she changed the deal since New Years’ Eve. She probably told you? I can envision you throwing a tantrum over that. I, also, am a bit peeved._

_The new deal, as you likely know, is that I have to go two weeks without hurting myself. So here I am, doing my time. Even though I’m not restrained, Safu still won’t let me leave. She actually locks me in my room, which is very cruel of her. You should give her a stern talking to. I myself have shouted at her a bit, but she’s as stubborn as you are. The two of you are a pain in the ass._

_As for the question on everyone’s mind (certainly Safu, who asks me enough times an hour) – Do I think you’re a hallucination anymore?_

_Hmm… Not really. No. I don’t think so. It would help to get to look at you, but Safu says since my New Years’ Eve stint, things have changed. I’m no longer to be trusted at all, or to be rewarded unless I really prove I can be a good boy. Well, I’m proving it, right? Haven’t hurt myself since._

_That’s a lie, obviously, seeing as you can probably do the math and are aware it’s the end of January, much more than eleven days past New Years’ Eve. Look, I’m trying. Maybe hurting myself did become habit. I don’t know, Shion. I’m trying something new now, though, I’m giving the not hurting myself thing a shot. Safu’s got me on different meds, too, I’m sure she told you about that._

_She’s even teaching me to knit, which is the least she can do to make life here mildly less aggravating. By the time I get out of here I should have a good quarter of a scarf to give you, maybe even a third. How long are scarfs supposed to be anyway? And you better wear it, professor, I’m putting my goddamn heart and soul into this thing. Even in the summer, I don’t care if you’re hot._

_Well. I’m optimistic, I guess. Safu made me say that in our last session. She literally pried the words out of me. Fine, I’m optimistic. I haven’t had a Momoe nightmare, or any nightmare, in six nights. How exciting, I know. Making strides and whatnot._

_Look, Shion. Can I be serious? I’m sorry about all this. I know you won’t let me apologize when I talk to you, but you can’t interrupt a letter, as much as you probably want to. I know a lot of this wasn’t my fault, but a lot of it was. You said me giving up was bullshit, and yeah, some of it was, but partly, it wasn’t. I did give up for a while there. I wanted to think you were dead because it was easier than the chance that you were alive, and the chance that I’d see you again, and you wouldn’t want me like this, all fucked up. Which you knew, obviously, you know everything, I know, I know, you’re a genius, stop shoving it in my face._

_I’m sorry I made you wait for me. I’m sorry I made you sad. Safu made me think the other day about if our places were reversed, if it was you in here, and me out there. She made me think about how I would feel if it was you, trying to rip out your own wrist veins with your teeth._

_It got bad, I know that. I let it get bad. I won’t let that happen again._

_In three days, I should see you again. I’m not the same as I was, and I’m fully aware of that. I told Safu to warn you, to tell you everything that’s different about me, and she said she would, but I don’t fully trust her._

_Listen. These meds have me a little off. Safu says I should even out, my body should get used to them in time, but for now, sometimes things just feel out of focus. Sometimes I just get really tired. Sometimes I get lightheaded. And, ah, sometimes I get irrationally anxious and start crying randomly – which sucks because isn’t that the opposite of what anti-depressants should do? Safu has all sorts of excuses for her drugs. Typical. And also…_

_Shit, okay, I can’t really, you know. Get aroused. Not that I have much stimulation in here, but I have attempted to jerk off with limited success. And by limited I mean no success at all. I asked Safu about it (which would have been mildly uncomfortable, but that woman is never fazed by anything, she’s amazing), and she said that’s normal and a lot of her patients on this med use, ah, Viagra and shit like that. So. I felt like I should mention that, so this is me mentioning that._

_Anyway. Look, I know it’s a lot. I just don’t want you thinking in three days when I’m out of here everything can just go back to how it was. I’m trying to get back to how it was, how I was, I just need some more time. And I want to work on that with you, out of this crazy house (Safu hates when I call it that, but she hates it more when I call it a loony bin, so we compromise)._

_Right. So, I’ll end the letter now, don’t want to waste any more paper since you’re the paper police all of a sudden, or any more of your precious time that you could be using to grade your students’ essays. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t get your hopes up too high. Mildly high is fine, I mean, I am getting out, I expect a warm enough welcome. A cake would be appreciated – come on, your mother works at a bakery, it’s not an impossible demand. But just – don’t be disappointed when you see me, okay?_

_Miss you._

_-N_

_*_


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cats! it's been a hundred years, but this chapter is actually the length of two chapters! so, you know, maybe that'll make up for it a little bit. hopefully i still have readers, and to those still here, thanks so much and i hope you enjoy it! :)

On the last day of January, Thursday morning, Nezumi took deep breaths and thought he was going to start crying. An effect of the meds, he knew, but he still wasn’t a fan of the rushes of heaviness in his body, the sudden surges of despair that seemed to take over him, the random compulsions to tear up.

            “Nezumi, you don’t need to be nervous. It’s Shion,” Safu said.

            Nezumi pulled his hair free from its ponytail, then quickly tied it back up. He ran his fingers through his bangs before tucking them behind his ears.

            He looked skinnier than he remembered himself looking, his cheeks a little gaunt. Like he was the starving vamp, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as Shion used to get. He hadn’t injured his face ever, but beneath his t-shirt were stretches of scabs from when Nezumi had scratched his skin off with his nails, and the slowly fading bruises along his elbows from where he’d slammed them against the walls, and the bandages around his wrists from where he’d ripped his skin wide open with his teeth.

            He pulled the sleeves of his jacket lower so they nearly covered his hands.

            “Nezumi,” Safu said gently. She stood at the open doorway of the psych ward bathroom while Nezumi stood in front of the sink staring in the mirror.

            He’d had Safu tell Shion not to come here, to the psych ward, that he didn’t want to be here a moment longer than he had to, though really it was because Nezumi didn’t want Shion to see him in this place. So Nezumi was going to meet Shion in the bakery. He had no idea why he’d thought this was a better plan. Karan was at the bakery. He’d not only have to see Shion, but Karan too.

            “Fuck,” Nezumi whispered, pressing his hands against the edges of the sink and staring at his own sunken face.

            “Nezumi. Whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s being made worse by the medication adjusting your hormones and chemical balance. Take deep breaths,” Safu said, stepping into the bathroom and touching Nezumi’s arm.

            “You told him, right? That the meds make me not right and – and all this shit. I don’t want him to think that’s just me, you told him it isn’t me, right?”

            “Of course. Shion knows medications have side effects. He doesn’t care about that. He cares about you, he just wants to see you.”

            Nezumi shook his head. Covered his eyes with his palm so he could no longer stare at himself in the mirror. “It’s too soon. I should stay here a little longer.”

            “You don’t want to stay here any longer. And you don’t need to. I’m your psychiatrist, I know that you don’t need to stay here any longer.”

            “I feel like shit, Safu. What if I hurt myself in front of him? I can’t do that to him.”

            “These thoughts about hurting yourself don’t have to scare you. You know you’re stronger than them, you know the urge is just a compulsion, a meaningless routine. But you don’t really want to hurt yourself, do you?”

            Nezumi dropped his hand from his eyes. Glanced at Safu. “No, I don’t.”

            “This doesn’t define you. Being in this place, hurting yourself, needing my help, your medication, the last two months. None of this defines you.”

            “Does Karan know?”

            Safu hesitated. “Yes. Shion told her.”

            Nezumi took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

            “You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, Nezumi.”

            “I tried to kill myself,” Nezumi replied. He looked down at his wrists to make sure they were still covered by his sleeves.

             “And, what, you think Karan will somehow look down on you for that? You really think that?”

            Nezumi kept trying to pull his sleeves lower. He wanted to cover all of himself, every inch.

            “Nezumi, look at me,” Safu said, so Nezumi looked at her.

            She was familiar in a worn and intimate way to him now, as if he’d known her all his life. He’d spent the last two months speaking almost solely to her for usually twelve hours a day, sometimes longer. She’d stayed up with him some nights when he asked her to, when he didn’t want to be alone in his room. The entire night, she stayed up. Nezumi had never had a friend who would do that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had any friends at all.

            “If you really believe you will be a danger to yourself if you leave here today, then that’s okay. Just tell me, and we’ll go right back to your room, and we can talk all you want about whatever you’re feeling right now. Don’t worry about Shion, I’ll talk to him, and I know you think he’ll be upset or disappointed, but he will understand.”

             “Will he?” Nezumi muttered, pushing his bangs back when they fell forward from his ears.

             “People don’t magically get better from the kinds of traumas you’ve been through, Nezumi. The fact that you’re doing so well just two months after you got here is incredible, it shows amazing strength. This isn’t a competition, of course, but many people are here for years, and the experiences you’ve had in your life are not any less traumatic by a long shot. I know that you are capable of ignoring pain and pushing away your past and forcing yourself to instantly get over whatever life puts you through, but that’s exactly the pattern I don’t want you to start falling into again. If you don’t trust yourself to leave here today without compromising your progress here, no one will blame you, no one will be mad.”

            Nezumi glanced down at his wrists again. Lifted his jacket sleeve so he could look at the bandage that Safu herself had wrapped around the mangled skin, changed every few days. He touched it lightly, could hardly remember the desperation that had made him rip his own skin open with his teeth. It felt like it’d happened so long ago even though it’d been only a month. He felt like the version of himself capable of doing such a thing had been an entirely different person.

            “I trust myself,” Nezumi said.

            “I think you should. I trust you, Nezumi, and I wouldn’t say that to boost your ego or get you out of here. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it.”

            “I know.”

            “So can we go see Shion now?”

            Nezumi looked again in the mirror. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he didn’t think he could find it, searching his own face. He hadn’t looked at his own reflection since he’d been here, and now he wasn’t sure he looked familiar. He wondered if Shion would recognize him.

            “Yeah. Let’s go,” Nezumi said, turning away from the mirror, following Safu down the various hallways of the psych ward, then through the lobby, then out the front doors.

            He lifted his face to the cool January morning, had to squint in the sunlight. His heart beat harder than it had in months, and he remembered in an instant what it was to feel alive and crave the feeling of it.

*

Karan had offered to close the bakery, but Shion insisted she keep it open. He thought Nezumi might like this too, being able to bake, being kept busy.

            So Shion was scooping sweet pineapple filling into dough for pine tarts when he heard Nezumi come in. Specifically, he heard his mother’s reaction to Nezumi coming in, which was –

            “Oh, honey, look at you! If I hug you I know I’ll never let you go, so go on back, Shion’s in the kitchen, let him take a look at you then you come right back up here, okay?”

            Shion wiped his hands on his apron. Wished he had a mirror to look at, stared around for his phone where he could have used his front-facing camera, but he didn’t find it before the door to the kitchen swung open.      

            Nezumi stood in the doorway blinking at Shion for just a moment before he walked quickly forward, and then he was hugging Shion before Shion had even managed to find his voice.

            Shion lifted his arms and hugged Nezumi back. The man squeezed him tightly. His body was tall and solid as it’d ever been, and Shion didn’t know why he’d expected the man to feel like smoke in his arms.

            He felt human and alive. Shion squeezed him tighter. Nezumi’s face was tucked between Shion’s neck and shoulder. Some of Nezumi’s hair was on Shion’s cheek and lips. He smelled like himself, earthy and a little like sweat, in a good and familiar and intoxicating way. When Shion breathed him in, his chest rose against Nezumi’s. Nezumi’s arms hugged Shion right below Shion’s underarms so that Shion’s arms naturally lifted, and he had them around Nezumi’s neck. Shion could hear Nezumi’s breaths, deep and slow. With every breath, Nezumi’s arms tightened, his body pressed closer.

            Shion wasn’t sure how long Nezumi held him until Nezumi spoke. Nezumi still didn’t lift his head from Shion’s neck so that his words pressed right against Shion’s skin and the loop of his apron.

            “Thank you for waiting for me,” he said in the rush of an exhale, voice so familiar, voice the same, there wasn’t any reason it would have been different, but Shion had been trying to prepare himself, had prepared himself for everything to be different – the feel of Nezumi in his arms, the smell of him, the sound of him.

            But nothing was different at all.

            “I waited for you all my life. I’ll never not wait for you,” Shion promised.

            Nezumi’s hair was loose and incredibly long, longer than Shion had ever seen it, he thought. Strands of it were caught between Shion’s eyelashes, and he blinked, staring up close at the dark stripes.

            Nezumi squeezed him tighter. Shion could feel where the man’s fingers gripped the back of his t-shirt, nearly dug through the thin fabric into his skin. He’d been wearing a sweater earlier in the day, but the heat of the kitchen and his own nerves had him taking it off. He was glad he’d taken it off. He didn’t want more layers between himself and Nezumi’s hold on him. He wished he had taken off his t-shirt too. He wished Nezumi’s fingers dug into his flesh, through it. He wanted Nezumi to mark him, tear him open. Prove that he was really here.

            In the next moment, Nezumi’s grip loosened, and then he was pulling away from Shion, not too much, just enough to look at Shion, to wrap his big palms and long fingers around both sides of Shion’s jaw and tilt Shion’s face up so that Shion thought Nezumi was going to kiss him.

            Nezumi didn’t kiss him. His face looked exactly the same. Maybe a little more tired, his skin a little thinner, but his eyes were alert and sharp. Shion had worried the meds Nezumi was on would dull them, had read up on the particular kind of anti-depressants Nezumi was taking and researched at length all the side effects, and one was haziness, but Nezumi didn’t seem hazy.

            He seemed focused, looked at Shion with the same kind of look that had drawn Shion to him in the first place – intent and searching, as if Shion was a mystery he was determined to solve, as if there was nothing else in his head but Shion.

            “I won’t ever make you wait again,” Nezumi said, voice clear and firm even though another side effect of the meds was sleepiness, slurring.

            Nezumi didn’t slur. His pupils were a little dilated, like they were searching for Shion in the dark.

            Shion unwound one arm from Nezumi’s neck. Tucked Nezumi’s long hair behind his ear. “Good,” he said. He wanted Nezumi to kiss him now. Another side effect of the meds was decreased libido, and he’d prepared himself for this too, stopped himself from kissing Nezumi, wanted Nezumi to make the choice to kiss him first.

            Nezumi’s eyes continued to search Shion’s face. Shion could feel the man’s body warmth wafting off of him. He wanted to pull Nezumi upstairs to his childhood bedroom. He wanted to lay Nezumi down and peel off his clothes and kiss him everywhere, so no inch of Nezumi’s skin could forget the feel of him.

            “All of my lifetimes are yours. You know that, right?” Nezumi asked, sounding almost solemn, almost too serious.

            Shion blinked at him, the intensity of his gaze. “Yes,” he replied. Of course he knew that. Nezumi was his. Nezumi would always be his.

            Nezumi’s exhale was hot on Shion’s face. His breath smelled minty, like he’d brushed his teeth right before coming here. Maybe he had.

            He leaned down, but he didn’t kiss Shion. Just rested his forehead against Shion’s.

            “I’ve told you I love you, right? I’ve said those words to you, right? They’re just words, but I want to know I’ve said them to you. Have I?”

            Shion had never needed those words from Nezumi. What a pointless thing to need, after Nezumi had stolen a hospital of blood for him. After Nezumi had endured excruciating torture for him. After Nezumi had gotten over his fear and loathing and childhood trauma of vamps for him.

            Shion didn’t need those words, but Nezumi had said them to him. Shion remembered vividly the moment Nezumi said those words to him. It was after Nezumi had found out he was a vamp. It was after Shion had nearly starved to death, after he’d been about to drink animal blood, after Nezumi had volunteered his blood instead even though he had been avoiding Shion since finding out the truth.

            _I’m stupidly in love with you, professor. I don’t know anything else, but I know this._

            It had not been a romantic moment. It had been a terrible moment because Shion knew that he scared Nezumi still.

            But Shion had remembered it. They were just words and he didn’t need them, but he’d never forget them.

            “Yes, you’ve told me,” Shion said. He wasn’t surprised Nezumi did not remember. Shion knew saying these words had not been a monumental moment for Nezumi. Shion knew Nezumi had loved him long before he’d ever said these words.

            Nezumi just looked at him. The intense sort of look was not unfamiliar, but it reminded Shion of like the looks Nezumi would give him before they’d really started dating, before they’d really become comfortable with each other.

            “Do you not believe me?” Shion asked, smiling lightly. He wanted to put Nezumi at ease. He wanted Nezumi to relax, to remember they were not only just meeting. They had worn into each other, creased each other with their bodies and voices and time. “You can say them again if you want, but really, I know you’ve said them. Not that I need you to say them. I’m well aware you’re very in love with me, I hope you don’t think you were keeping it a secret.”

            “I don’t want it to be a secret,” Nezumi said, still seriously. He’d lifted his forehead from Shion’s to give him a deeper look.

            “Well, it’s not.”

            “Do you understand what I mean when I say I love you?”

            Shion almost wanted to shake the man, to jostle the seriousness out of him. He wanted Nezumi to smile, to press his laughter into Shion’s neck. He wanted Nezumi to be happy because Shion felt he was bursting with it. “Nezumi, do you really think I don’t understand? I know what we are to each other. You have nothing to prove to me. You don’t need to explain anything to me.”

            A crease fell between Nezumi’s eyes. “How can you understand when I don’t?” he asked quietly.

            Shion wrapped his hand around a thick bunch of Nezumi’s hair that fell over his left shoulder, held it loosely just to hold onto the man in some way. “What don’t you understand?”

            “All this time, for months, I’ve felt…” Nezumi shook his head, crease deepening between his eyes. “And then now, suddenly, you’re alive and I’m with you and all that shit is gone. Everything is gone. I thought I’d feel lost and insane forever, but it’s all gone in an instant. All it took was you? All this time?”

            “Of course not. It took two months of getting help. It took medication and therapy. It took working hard, you did that, Nezumi, don’t give me all the credit,” Shion said.

            Nezumi exhaled hard. Pushed his forehead against Shion’s again. Spoke very quietly in words that fell in a quick rush over Shion’s lips. “You said in one of your letters that I’m your family. You mean that, right? Forever, right?”

            Shion was not used to Nezumi being so nervous. Needing validation, needing assurance. He remembered what Nezumi had said, that he was a little different now, that it was just an effect of the meds, but Shion wasn’t entirely certain this man so close to unraveling was the product of medication.

            He thought maybe it was the product of a lifetime of being abandoned. A lifetime of being hurt. A lifetime of loss.

            “You’re not my boyfriend, Nezumi. You’re my life, my whole life, the rest of it is yours, and the rest of yours is mine, I know that more solidly than I know anything. We’ve only known each other a little over a year, but it’s so clear to me that you are not just a man I met one day and fell for. I was born to fall in love with you, and I’ll do it for the rest of my life.”

            Nezumi continued to search Shion’s face with his dilated eyes. His thumb rubbed hard against Shion’s cheek. It was his left thumb, but Shion couldn’t feel any roughness from it, wondered if the slicing of his palm and thumb with that kitchen knife had healed completely, wondered if there’d be scars on his hands, lifelines he’d added to his own skin.

            Shion didn’t know the details of how else Nezumi had hurt himself – outside of what he had done to his wrists, information Shion had pried out of Safu after shouting at her for twenty minutes.

            But the rest, he did not know. The Nezumi he knew had always been scarred – first the burn on his back, then the words on his chest. Shion wondered what more scars he’d discover this time, loved discovering new things about Nezumi but hoped these scars would be the last of them.

            He wanted Nezumi to spend the rest of his life healing.

            Nezumi’s nose slid against his, and then Nezumi’s lips touched his, parted against his only slightly. The pressure of his mouth was not light but not hard. It reminded Shion of their first kiss, kneeling on very floor of this same kitchen. The first kiss Shion had ever had, and he realized how lucky he was, that his first kiss was with the person he’d spend the rest of his life with.

            Every kiss he’d ever had in his life was important. Was the best kiss, made his heart swell, made his chest hurt, made his knees weak. Every kiss he’d ever had took his breath away – how many people could say that?

            How many vamps could say that?

            Nezumi emptied his lungs into Shion’s mouth. Shion kissed him back. Tilted his head so his lips could fit against Nezumi’s in a different way because he loved every way their lips could fit.

            It was Nezumi who ended the kiss, after less than half a minute.

            “My life is yours,” Nezumi whispered, and Shion wasn’t sure if he was just repeating what Shion had said, turning the words over in his mouth like a stone, trying to understand them.

            Or maybe he was promising them to Shion. Giving the words back in a vow.

            Shion stepped closer to him, pressed his face into Nezumi’s chest, felt Nezumi’s fingers fall into his hair and listened for the beat of Nezumi’s heart below the fabric of his sweater. A heart that belonged to Shion as much as his own did, finally returned to him again.

*

The new apartment did not appear lived in despite the fact that Shion insisted he’d been living in it since their lease started in November, three full months before.

            The kitchen, of course, had not been used at all, but Shion being a vamp gave no excuse for the living room or bathroom or bedroom, which Nezumi examined in full.

            He even touched the bristles of Shion’s toothbrush to test them.

            “Dry,” he noted.

            “I haven’t brushed my teeth since this morning,” Shion replied. “Please don’t touch my toothbrush. Yours is the blue one, touch that one if you have to.”

            Nezumi ducked down, scrutinized the contents of the bathroom cupboard.

            “You can’t complain about how I organized things. If you were here, you could have organized them yourself.”

            Nezumi picked up bottles of foundation, boxes of hair-dye, packs of contacts, then threw them all back in.

            “Are you messing it up? Nezumi, I have a system,” Shion complained at the doorway.

            “You’re taking up the whole cupboard.”

            “I have more things than you.”

            “My job depends on my appearance, you know, I have beauty products too,” Nezumi replied, standing up and shutting the cupboard, glancing at himself in the mirror over the sink as he did so.

            “Those aren’t beauty products, they’re necessary for my survival, as you’re well aware of. And what job? You think Kage is just going to take you back after so long?” Shion countered, while Nezumi looked away from the mirror and walked past him, heading to the bedroom to see if Shion took up the whole closet too with his button ups and cardigans.

            “Who?” Nezumi asked, sliding open the closet doors.

            “Don’t pretend you don’t know the name of your manager.”

            “You already told me in one of your letters that asshole misses me, of course he’ll take me back.”

            “Missing you is not the same as tolerating you. It’s very unprofessional to be absent for so many months of work. And your stuff is on the other side of the closet before you start with me.”

            Nezumi slid the closet doors the other way to reveal his clothes hung up on hangers. He touched his shirts and jackets.  

            “I think we should go to the theater tomorrow to sort it all out,” Shion said.

            Nezumi glanced at him. “You said you talked to the manager. What did you tell him?”     

            “I told him you were recovering,” Shion said, after a moment.

            “Recovering from what?”

            “I said nothing more specific than that.”

            “Because it’s not his business,” Nezumi warned.

            “Yes, yes, I know,” Shion said, waving his hand and walking to the dresser against the adjacent wall. “Your drawers are the left ones. Underwear and socks in here, pants in here, sweaters in here.”

            “The new season’s production would have started. What is it?”

            “ _Jekyll and Hyde,_ ” Shion said, at the bed now, pointing to the side by the door. “That’s my side. You’re there.”

            “I don’t get a say in the side of the bed I get? Who’s the lead?”

            “No, you don’t get a say in this,” Shion replied, sitting on the side of the bed he’d claimed as his. “I don’t know who the lead is, I haven’t gone to a show. The theater’s not nearly as riveting without you.”

            “You chose the side closest to the door. If there’s some emergency, you have the advantage,” Nezumi said. He stayed by the dresser instead of going to the bed, instead of sitting beside Shion even though it was late, they’d spent the day at the bakery and Nezumi was exhausted from spending an entire day doing things that weren’t just talking to Safu about his feelings.

            “Why do you think I chose this side? I want the advantage,” Shion said. He scooched back on the bed so he sat against the headboard, pillow caught between it and his back.

            Nezumi didn’t want to feel nervous. He didn’t feel nervous. It was the meds that made him feel anything, everything, nervousness among that everything or not, he didn’t know.

            “I bought Viagra, after your letter,” Shion said, pointing to the nightstand, where Nezumi assumed the Viagra was, or maybe it was the letters that were in there.

            Nezumi pushed his bangs off his forehead. “Yeah. Good.”

            “Nezumi.”

            “Mmm?” Nezumi turned away from him. Opened the drawers Shion had said were his and looked at his clothes folded neatly. He hated thinking about Shion folding them neatly. He hated thinking about Shion putting his clothes in these drawers when Nezumi should have been the one to do it, Nezumi should have been here, helping Shion move in the furniture, helping Shion arrange things, fighting with Shion over what side of the bed they slept on.

            “Come here.”

            “Did someone help you move in all this furniture?” Nezumi asked, slamming closed his drawers, opening Shion’s now just to do something, just so he didn’t have to look at Shion sitting alone on that bed that he’d been sleeping on alone for three months even though Nezumi should have been here, there shouldn’t have been one night that Shion slept alone on their bed in this apartment they’d chosen together.

            “Don’t do this. Don’t start this.”

            “Start what?” Nezumi asked. He wanted to pick up handfuls of Shion’s socks and throw them around the room. He wanted to rip their fabric apart. He felt agitated and restless and wanted to be anywhere but this apartment he shared with Shion even though they didn’t share it, not really, Nezumi never gave them a chance to share it.

            “Hey,” Shion said, and Nezumi jumped because the man was right beside him.

            “Shit,” he breathed, back flattening against the dresser, the knobs of the drawers digging into his spine.

            Shion held up his hands. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just want you to look at me. I’m not mad at you. You shouldn’t be mad at yourself.”

            “Did I say I was mad at myself?” Nezumi snapped. He wanted to hit Shion, and the moment he wanted this, he wanted to cry.

            He wished he was at the psych ward. He wished Safu was in the room with him, talking to him. He missed her voice, her words and her logic and the way she made it seem like Nezumi was not going crazy when all evidence pointed otherwise.

            Shion said nothing. Just looked at him and this was worse. Nezumi wished the man wouldn’t look at him.

            Nezumi tried to think of what Safu would say to do. Breathe. She was always telling him to breathe, as if without her reminder he wouldn’t do it at all, but he realized in that moment he wasn’t breathing, so he did, deeply, let it out slowly.

            Shion reached out, placed his hand flat on Nezumi’s chest, and Nezumi wanted to shove him away, wanted to grab Shion hard in his arms, wanted Shion to hold him, wanted too many things that he couldn’t name.

            “I don’t need you to pretend with me. I don’t need you to put on a front, to act composed if you’re not, to be anything you’re not. But you’re not allowed to snap at me for no reason. I won’t tolerate that. If you’re mad, tell me, don’t bottle it up and close off from me.”

            Nezumi looked away from him, around this room that was theirs. He’d never lived with another person since his family so many years ago.

            “Safu told you, right?” Nezumi said, to the walls of the room, to the ceiling and the bed. “The meds just need to even out, or something, hormones – She can tell you, she knows more about it, I don’t – ”

            “She told me. Look at me, look at me for just a second, I went so many months not being looked at by you, I don’t want to go another moment.”

            Nezumi looked at him. Shion had a small smile, and it was as stupid looking as his wide, goofy smiles used to be. Nezumi wondered how long it would be until Shion gave him one of those again.

            “I see you still say stupid shit,” Nezumi said, after a moment, watching Shion’s smile grow slightly, trying not to be hopeful.

            “I always will. Now it’s late, and I have an early class tomorrow, so I’d like to go to bed. I’d love to have sex with you, so I’m going to go brush my teeth and wash my face, and while I do that, you can decide for yourself if you’re in the mood for sex. If you’re not, just tell me, don’t get all mopey and bitter. You need to be honest with me now.”

            “Do you have to be so annoying about everything?” Nezumi muttered, as Shion turned away from him, presumably to go to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face as he’d ridiculously felt the need to explain.

            It was so strange being around the man again. Shion hadn’t changed at all, but Nezumi knew he had. He could feel it, the ways he was different pushing itself between them.

            “Think about it,” Shion said, calling over his shoulder, and then he was out of the room, and a few seconds later, Nezumi could hear the water of the bathroom sink running.

            While Shion was gone, Nezumi undressed into just boxers and a clean t-shirt. He hesitated in the bedroom, then headed to the bathroom and picked up his blue toothbrush and brushed his teeth beside Shion at the sink, then washed his face with Shion’s facewash even though it wasn’t the facewash he preferred. He tried to be normal, to feel normal. He tried to be a man Shion could still love and want.

            After Shion washed his face, his scar was visible. Nezumi touched it.

            “Leave so I can pee.”

            “We live together now. Pee in front of me.”

            “I don’t want to,” Shion said, pointing out the door, but Nezumi just sat on the edge of the tub, so Shion sighed and stood in front of the toilet and peed.

            “Are you going to wash off your foundation from everywhere else?” Nezumi asked while he peed.

            “I’m too tired to do any of that right now.”  

            “Let me wash it off for you then.”

            “I would still have to stand in the shower. Let’s just go to bed.”

            Nezumi stood up from the tub when Shion flushed the toilet. He turned on the shower, wondering how long the spray took to heat up. “Please?” he managed. He didn’t want to go to bed yet. He knew things were strange between himself and Shion, he knew this was his own fault, he wanted more time to make things right, to show Shion he could still be who he was, he could still be desirable.

            Shion looked at Nezumi for a moment before he nodded, started pulling off his clothes.

            Nezumi pulled his own off too, since he would be the one washing Shion. He tested the shower spray with his palm, felt that it was warm – almost immediately – and stepped in, then moved over so Shion could stand below the spray.

            “Here.” Shion offered Nezumi a blue loufa and a bottle of body wash.

            “There’s only one loufa.”

            “Yours is in the cupboard. Don’t even think about using mine,” Shion warned.

            His dark hair matted to his head from the shower spray. Nezumi squeezed body wash on the loufa and examined Shion’s wet body for a few seconds, then crouched down to start at his ankle.

            “Tell me when you have to take your meds,” Shion said, while Nezumi loufa’d his left knee, then his right.

            “Morning, midday, and night.”

            “I didn’t notice you taking any today.”

            “I took them when I went to the bathroom at the bakery.”

            “You don’t have to hide them from me.”

            “I wasn’t,” Nezumi said, loufa-ing Shion’s thigh, revealing the stripe of his scar wrapped around it.

            “I researched them online.”

            Nezumi rubbed the loufa over the back of Shion’s legs, which he couldn’t see, as Shion faced him.

            “You promise you won’t pretend with me, right? On how you’re feeling. On if you’re in the mood for sex. Don’t do things to appease me,” Shion said, while Nezumi watched the suds wash off his waist where he’d loufa’d next.

            “I’m not doing anything to appease you.” Nezumi didn’t know if this was a lie or not.

            “Ever, I mean. Not just right now. Tonight and tomorrow and every day after that.”

            “Have I ever done anything to appease you?” Nezumi asked, standing up and turning Shion around by his shoulders even though he hadn’t finished Shion’s torso. He trailed the loufa from the nape of Shion’s neck down along his spine. He was relieved that Shion was not looking at him.

            “I don’t know. Have you?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi washed his lower back in circles, then upward. Didn’t turn Shion around and raised both of Shion’s arms one at a time, loufa’d along the length of them, over his shoulders. After he loufa’d all of Shion’s back, he pressed his lips to Shion’s clean skin where his neck sloped down into his shoulders. Shion’s skin was warm from the shower spray, or maybe his own body heat, or maybe both.

            When he touched Shion, even just his lips on Shion’s neck, he felt a little less like he was unraveling.

            Shion tilted his head the other way. Exposed more of his neck for Nezumi to kiss, so Nezumi did, up to his earlobe, then took his lips away.

            “Turn around.”

            Shion turned back around. Nezumi loufa’d the front of him, starting from his neck and working down to his waist where he’d left off. When Shion was clean, his scar completely uncovered, Nezumi stood still and let Shion look at him.

            He knew what Shion was looking at. Shion’s hands stayed at his sides, then came toward him, touched the scratches over the skin of Nezumi’s ribs.

            “They’ll heal,” Nezumi said.

            Shion’s fingers trailed along his body, paused briefly at the bruises around his elbow, continued on to his wrists. The bandages were wet. It didn’t matter. Nezumi had planned to rebandage them that night anyway.

            “How bad does it look?” Shion asked, touch light over his bandages.

            “Worse than it is,” Nezumi said, though he wasn’t sure if this was true. It had been pretty terrible. He’d almost died. He’d been disappointed when he hadn’t died. He wasn’t sure how much of this Safu had told Shion, how much Shion understood.

            Shion moved his fingers back to Nezumi’s chest, this time on the letters that Momoe had left.

            “Can you be honest with me?” Shion asked quietly. He looked at the letters and not Nezumi’s face. Water from the shower dripped down Shion’s eyelashes and the tip of his nose in little waterfalls.

            “Yes,” Nezumi said, but even this he thought might have been a lie.

            “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

            Safu had asked Nezumi the same question. He’d been honest with her in a way he hadn’t expected to be. It felt only fair that he be honest with Shion too.

            He took a slow breath. “I thought you were dead, so I wanted to be, too. I thought it’d be the only way I could see you again, since you weren’t coming back as a hallucination any longer,” Nezumi said softly. He watched the waterfalls dripping off Shion’s face for ripples to signify Shion’s reaction.

            Shion didn’t have any reaction at first, and Nezumi wondered if maybe the man hadn’t heard him, maybe the gentle shower spray had been louder than his voice, but then Shion was looking up at him. His face was wet, but that was from the shower.

            “It was a low point,” Nezumi explained, when Shion stayed silent. “The meds I was on weren’t right for me, and it was a combination of things. It’s not going to happen again. I don’t want to die. I didn’t want to die even then, I just…”

            Shion nodded. He hadn’t taken out his contacts and his eyes were brown.

            “Can I take out your contacts?”

            Shion nodded again, so Nezumi held Shion’s face with one hand, used the tips of his fingers of the other to pluck out the left contact, then the right.

            He let them wash away down the shower drain. Shion’s red eyes stared back at him.

            “You’ve been drinking a bag of blood every day, right?” Nezumi asked, though he didn’t think he had to ask. Shion looked healthy, the healthiest Nezumi had ever seen him.

            “Yeah.”

            “Good.”

            They stood in the shower a little longer, and then Shion said the hot water was making him too exhausted to stand, so they got out, drying each other and going to the bedroom, getting dressed in just t-shirts and underwear.

            Nezumi let Shion change his bandages on his wrist. Shion made no reaction to the mangled skin of his wrists when it was exposed. It looked better than it had a month before, but it still didn’t look good. There wasn’t any need for bandages – the wound was no longer open – but Nezumi wore them anyway to hide the warped skin.

            They got in bed on their respective sides, but Shion quickly rolled over into the middle, lay on his side and looked at Nezumi.

            “Well?” he asked, and said nothing else, but he didn’t need to.

            The bed smelled like Shion. Nezumi wanted to be absorbed by it. He reached out, pulled Shion’s t-shirt, and Shion inched forward so no space of mattress existed between them.

            “Not tonight, professor,” Nezumi said back, curling himself into Shion’s chest.

            Shion’s fingers wove through his hair, still wet from the shower.

            Nezumi slid an arm beneath Shion’s body even though he knew the weight of the man would make it fall asleep. He wrapped his other arm over Shion’s side, brought him closer, felt Shion intertwine their legs.

            He didn’t feel aroused or any desire to have sex and was too tired for it anyway. He just wanted what he had – Shion in his arms, Shion’s breath against the crown of his head, Shion’s whisper curling in his ear, the last thing he heard before he fell asleep.

            “You’re home now.”

*

Nezumi’s libido was not always low. Intense impulses for sex seemed to come over him in spurts that neither he nor Shion could predict. But even when Nezumi was suddenly in the mood, he couldn’t get an erection no matter what they tried, so Shion began leaving Viagra pills all over the new apartment.

            They were, of course, in the bedside nightstand. They were in two drawers of the kitchen. They were in the end tables in the living room. They were in the bathroom cabinet. They were in the front room of the bakery, the drawer below the cash register where Karan kept receipts and extra rolls of coins. They were in the drawer of the kitchen that held miscellaneous items, like scissors and rubber bands. Usually, Shion tried to put some pills in his pocket every morning as well, just in case Nezumi grabbed for him or started kissing his neck or slipped his hands up Shion’s shirt somewhere Shion had forgotten to put Viagra within reach.

            Unfortunately, Viagra, like Nezumi’s anti-depressants, had side effects. When Nezumi started having nosebleeds and complained about a tingling in the tips of his fingers, Shion asked Safu if these were from the anti-depressants or the Viagra or the combination of both.

            “How much Viagra is he taking?” Safu asked.

            They were in Shion’s university office, where Safu had met Shion for lunch in between two of his Wednesday classes. Of course, Shion didn’t eat, but Safu had bought a salad from the university’s grocery store.

            Nezumi was at the theater for stage crew rehearsal. Kage hadn’t put him into _Jekyll and Hyde_ because there were only three more weeks of the play. Nezumi spent most afternoons when they weren’t at the bakery rehearsing in the apartment for auditions for the next show, _Twelfth Night._ Shion had never seen him so nervous about auditions, but he knew Nezumi was worried his acting wouldn’t be the same on meds.

            And it wasn’t. Sometimes when Shion read lines with him, he could see Nezumi slip out of character in a way Nezumi never had before. Nezumi could see this too – he often got frustrated with himself, even when Shion thought he was doing well, and would throw down his script, leave the apartment to take a walk or go to Karan’s to ice a cake or shut himself in the bedroom.

            “Not a lot, we don’t have sex that often. Maybe once a day, sometimes twice.”

            Safu raised her eyebrows. “That’s not often?”

            “We haven’t seen each other in a while!” Shion said defensively.

            “He tells me his sex drive is low,” Safu said.

            Even though Nezumi had been out of the psychiatric hospital for a little over two weeks now, he still had therapy sessions with Safu twice a week.

            “Well, it’s low compared to before,” Shion said. “And there are some days we don’t have sex at all, too.”

            Safu closed her salad container, set it beside her chair and leaned forward. “I’m considering switching his medications, so it may not be an issue anymore. The new combination shouldn’t affect his ability to get an erection.”

            “Why are you switching his meds? He’s doing fine on this one.”

            “I shouldn’t even be telling you any of this, it breaches doctor-patient confidentiality. If you want to know more, you can ask Nezumi,” Safu said, standing up and stretching before glancing at her watch. “You should get going, you have class soon.”

            Shion stood but didn’t make any motions to get ready for class. “He doesn’t even have nightmares anymore. He hasn’t tried to hurt himself at all. Right?”

            Safu bent down for her salad container, straightened up again and looked at Shion. “Like I said, I can’t talk about this with you.”

            “Are you saying he’s told you he still wants to hurt himself?” Shion demanded. He could feel panic tightening his throat.

            “I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything because Nezumi is my patient now, not just your boyfriend we can gossip about. I need to respect that, and so do you.”

            “I’m not gossiping about him, I need to know if he’s okay, or if I’m going to come home to find slicing up his body with our kitchen knives!” Shion shouted.

            “Shion, you must see that it’s not ethical for us to talk like this,” Safu said sternly.

            “For just a second, stop being his psychiatrist and be my best friend again! Do I need to worry about him, Safu? He doesn’t talk to me about this stuff, I want him to but I don’t want to pressure him, so I don’t know what’s going on in his head. I thought that therapy would make him open up more, that’s what you said.”

            “He is opening up more,” Safu said, voice hard.

            “With you! Not with me!” Shion shouted back. He hated himself for thinking these things. He hated wanting more from Nezumi when he knew, completely, that Nezumi was doing the best he could, was giving him everything he could. He hated that a part of him had thought Nezumi would be perfect and himself when he came out of the psychiatric hospital, that Safu would heal him completely, that all he’d have to worry about was lack of erections and other manageable side effects, not coming home from work to hear Nezumi crying in the shower and not knowing if he should hide the kitchen knives and throw out all the pills in their apartment.

            The man was on anti-depressants and that should have meant he wasn’t depressed, but Shion was not so sure about this. Sometimes Nezumi was fully himself, laughed and teased Shion and kissed him deep and hard and dramatically complained about the way Shion cooked soup. And Shion was well aware Nezumi had been moody even before any of this had happened, but Nezumi’s moods weren’t the same now. Or maybe they were the same, and what was different was that Shion had never been worried about Nezumi’s safety before, no matter what kind of mood Nezumi was in.

            Before, when Nezumi got angry, when they would fight, Shion didn’t have to worry if it would lead to Nezumi with a knife in his hand.

            Shion wanted to feel reassured that Nezumi was safe from himself now, but he wasn’t. And he didn’t know if Nezumi felt reassured either, or if Nezumi was just as scared of finding a knife in his own hand, of wanting to hurt himself again.

            “I know you’re worried about him,” Safu said quietly. “But my job isn’t to fix him and return him to you as someone happy and carefree – ”

            “I know that – ”

            “He’s a human being, Shion, who’s had a very complicated and hard life, and his past will always be with him, and that’s a huge part of his progress. He is no longer blocking his past, no longer forcing his memories away, but confronting them and accepting them and healing instead of ignoring.”

             “Safu, I get that, I do, but – ”

             “You met Nezumi when he pushed everything terrible out of his life, but now he’s not doing that anymore, and that’s a great and important thing, and you need to come to terms with what that means. It means the grief he never let himself feel after the Great Slaughter, he’s handling that now. He’s mourning the loss of his family in a way he never allowed himself to do before. You need to give him both space and support to do that without having some ideal version of him in your head that you’re waiting for him to magically become.”

            Shion had no protest to that. He didn’t want Nezumi to magically become some ideal version of himself. He just wanted Nezumi to be happy. He didn’t think that was an ideal version, an impossible thing. He didn’t think that was an unrealistic want, but he didn’t really know.

            Safu sighed, reached out and squeezed Shion’s hand quickly. “You love him and he knows that, and right now, that’s the best you can do for him, that’s all he wants from you. Just keep doing that, and everything will be fine. He needs time to work through the things he’s avoided his whole life. That’s all I can say to you about it, okay? Now hurry up, your class is about to start.”

            Shion knew that he had class, but he wanted to skip it. He wanted to email his students to go home and go home himself, where Nezumi would be returning from stage crew any minute now. He knew he had to trust Nezumi, but even so, he just wanted to with the man right now, making sure there was no knife in his hand, no blood in the tub, no blood in the sink.

*

Nezumi knew Shion was wary around him.

            He didn’t know what to say to Shion to promise him that he’d never hurt himself again. He spent weeks trying to figure out what to say, and then a month after he got out of the psych ward and moved into their apartment, he woke with an idea.

            Shion was not in bed, so Nezumi got up alone, dressed and brushed his teeth and peed before finding Shion in the kitchen. The man was standing in front of the counter with a mug in one hand, looking down at the newspaper he had spread open in front of him.

            “Hi,” Nezumi said, coming next to him, peering down at the paper, seeing nothing on possible vamp sightings in his quick sweep of the page and losing interest.

            “Oh, you scared me, I didn’t even hear you get up,” Shion said.

            Nezumi kissed him until Shion pulled away, covering his lips with his hand.

            “Don’t, I’m bloody.”

            “I don’t care,” Nezumi said, leaning forward again. He was used to the taste of blood by now, had kissed Shion enough times with blood on his lips to no longer be shocked by it.

            Shion kissed him back now, then leaned away again. “How do you feel?” he asked. He always asked this, and Nezumi knew every time he asked, a part of Shion braced himself to hear something terrible.

            “Good. There’s something I want to do today. Can you cancel class?”

            Shion glanced at his watch. He was already dressed in his professor clothes, button up and slacks, sleeves rolled up, absurdly sexy. “It’s in an hour.”

            “Cancel anyway.”

            “You have stage crew.”

            “I’ll call in sick.”

            “I don’t think you have any sick days left.”

            “Shion,” Nezumi sighed. “Stop being so difficult. Can you cancel class or not?”

            “Why?”

            “I want to take you to Kyoto,” Nezumi said, hesitantly, and he was right to be so, as in the next moment, Shion’s face closed off.

            “Why?” he asked again, this time almost harshly.

            “It’s not just a place where I learned to hurt myself,” Nezumi reminded. Safu had told him it was important for him to not only remember the good parts of his past, but to share them with the people in his life now.

            He’d never shared his past with Shion. He’d shared it with strangers on scripted tours. He needed to fix that.

            Shion was ripping off little pieces of the edge of the newspaper, and Nezumi placed his hand over Shion’s to stop him, slipped his fingers between Shion’s.

            “It’s important,” he said gently.

            When Shion was nervous, he didn’t make eye contact. He looked around the room, his shoulders stiff in his button-up. He’d put on his foundation and contacts already, his scar covered up, his eyes red.

            “Okay. I’ll cancel class, you get train tickets,” Shion said finally, nodding and slipping his hand free from Nezumi’s.

            He put his mug to his lips, drank the rest of the blood in a loud swallow, pressed his hand to the back of his lips when he lowered the mug to the counter and glanced at Nezumi, a quick dart of his dark eyes.

            “Go on,” Nezumi said, nodding toward the bathroom, so Shion left the kitchen.

            Nezumi bought them train tickets on his phone, then washed Shion’s mug, watching the traces of blood that had stuck to the ceramic sides of it slip down the sink. It reminded him of his own blood, slipping down the drain in his apartment in Kyoto. Or his blood spurting out his wrist when he finally bit through the skin, nearly screaming from the pain of it.

            Instead of stopping, he’d bit harder. He hadn’t wanted to give himself a chance to survive. But he still hadn’t bitten hard enough, deep enough.          

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi dropped the clean mug in the sink. The faucet was still on, and Shion reached out, turned it off.

            “Ready?” Nezumi asked. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, and he cleared his throat.

            Shion just looked at him.

            “I’m okay, professor.” A part of Nezumi wanted to tell Shion about tearing at his own skin with his teeth until it broke and there was blood in his mouth and everywhere. A part of Nezumi wanted to tell Shion how much it had hurt. A part of Nezumi wanted to tell Shion everything.

            But Nezumi didn’t know how to get the words out, to give Shion all of his thoughts the way Shion did for him. Nezumi was used to keeping his thoughts to himself, and even though Shion had changed much of this, there were secrets Nezumi hadn’t shared. The worst of it, of everything in Nezumi’s life, he hadn’t shared.

           Nezumi would listen to Safu. Take steps. Do this right. Tell Shion about the worst things, a little bit at a time. Tell Shion about himself.

           “The train leaves soon,” he said, tilting his head to the front door, and Shion nodded though he still seemed doubtful.

           They left the apartment they shared. Took the subway to the train station. Sat beside each other on the train, while Shion read a section in one of the textbooks he was teaching his class, and Nezumi looked out the window. Some days everything felt normal. Some days were like this, disjointed, where he felt he couldn’t reach Shion, or maybe it was Shion that couldn’t reach him.

           Nezumi wanted Shion to be able to reach him always. He was working on that. He’d get there, wherever Shion needed him to be. He’d get there.

           It was a four-hour ride. Shion fell asleep at one point, or maybe he just closed his eyes. While he did so, Nezumi looked at him. Fully in his human disguise, body rocking gently with the train, fingers curled over the hardcover of his textbook.

           He could have been a stranger. He should have been a stranger. There had been a point in Nezumi’s life, just a year before, where everyone had been strangers. He’d known no one on any train he’d taken, or any bus. He’d known no one and he hadn’t realized how badly he’d wanted to. Just one person who could know him. Who could think about him, even when he wasn’t in the same room. Who could dream of him.

           Nezumi didn’t count his castmates. He didn’t count Kage or Shunsuke or make-up Misaki. He didn’t count people obligated to see him for work. Even sex had been an obligation. Everything in his life had been an obligation, a necessity, a basic requisite to make it to the next day, but since Shion, Nezumi’s life had become a series of wants.

           How awful it was, to want. With necessities, there were a set few: shelter, food, water, money. With wants, they could be infinite. He used to want only for Shion to kiss him. Now, his wants seemed endless. Unsatisfiable. Unearned. He wanted everything from Shion, but he’d given nothing back. He’d never even given the man his name.

           “I know you’re staring at me,” Shion murmured, eyes still closed.

           “It wasn’t a secret,” Nezumi replied, and Shion smiled, a small smile, not a smile a stranger would ever offer.

           When they got to Kyoto, Nezumi led Shion to the memorial grounds. The other tour guides spotted him immediately, ran to him, asked where he’d been, and Nezumi forgot he’d disappeared on them. He’d never even called them, two months before when he’d left Kyoto, to let them know he was leaving work.

           It took longer than he would have preferred to get his old coworkers to leave him alone, but he managed, assured everyone he was fine but wouldn’t be coming back and finally was able to extract himself and Shion from them.

           “It must have really hit their business when you left unexpectedly like that,” Shion said.

           “Must have,” Nezumi agreed, pulling Shion by the hand around the small groups of tourists.

           “Do you miss giving tours here?”

           “Not at all.”

           “But you miss it. Being here, in Kyoto.”

           “I’m here right now, aren’t I? Can’t miss a place when I’m standing in it.”

           “Of course you can,” Shion said.

           Nezumi stopped walking. Kept Shion’s hand in his and looked at him, but Shion was looking straight ahead, at the wall of stone Nezumi had led him to.

           “I looked for your family when I was here before, but I don’t know their names,” Shion said, after a moment.

           Nezumi turned to the wall. They stood in front of the third column of names, and Nezumi raised his free hand, touched one of the names.

           “Your dad,” Shion said, after a moment.

           “Me,” Nezumi corrected. He felt Shion’s hand flinch in his, so he let the man go, and Shion lifted his own hand, touched the carved letters of Nezumi’s own name.

           It was, of course, impossible, but Nezumi was certain he could feel Shion’s fingers on his own skin. The light touch of them. The warm and hesitant flutter of fingertips.

           Shion stepped closer to the wall.

           “You didn’t think my parents named me Nezumi, did you?” Nezumi asked.

           Shion’s lips were parted. His eyes were wide. His fingers were still on Nezumi’s name. Now, Nezumi was no longer the only person left in the world who knew it. Now, someone else did too.

           Shion whispered the syllables Nezumi hadn’t heard in decades. He felt five years old in an instant. He felt the heat of the kitchen when his parents cooked supper. He felt the squeeze of his sister’s arm around his waist and the cool of her bare feet on his calves when she slipped into bed with him after a nightmare. He felt the splash of wintry river water on his cheeks and dripping from the strands of his hair. Soft grass around his toes. Fingers combing his hair. A hand rubbing circles on his back. The large bodies of his parents on either side of him in bed when he was the one with the nightmare. Hands around his ankles as he rode his dad’s shoulders. A tug on his t-shirt as his sister called his name, the same syllables that he’d forgotten had once belonged to him, had once been his, had once seemed permanent, like they would last forever, like he’d hear them the rest of his life, countless times a day, so many times they lost meaning until it all came back at once, at this moment, in Shion’s voice.

           “Hey.”

           Nezumi’s eyes were closed. Shion’s hand was on his cheek. He felt like he might pass out. He refused to pass out. He remembered Safu telling him to breathe, and so he breathed, and he felt less like passing out.

           He opened his eyes. There was Shion and only Shion, not his mom or dad or sister.

           “I won’t say it again. I just wanted to once. I hope that’s okay.”

           Nezumi made himself keep breathing. Shion’s hand slid from his cheek. “You can call me whatever you want, professor,” Nezumi said, and it wasn’t a lie.

           Shion had said he was his family, and Nezumi’s name belonged to his family. It belonged to Shion now, too.

           “I want to call you Nezumi,” Shion said quietly, and Nezumi didn’t understand his relief, but he knew Shion did.

           He knew Shion understood him. Even the parts of himself Nezumi didn’t understand, he knew Shion, genius Shion, did.

           “The name above mine is my mother’s. Above hers is my dad. And beneath mine,” Nezumi reached out and touched it, “my little sister.”

           Shion didn’t say any of these names aloud. He looked at them for a long time, and Nezumi let him.

           After a minute or so, Nezumi pointed out others. Grandparents. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Neighbors. The teacher Nezumi was supposed to have the next year. The woman who sold the sweetest fruit at the market. The man with the corn maize that he’d let all the kids – including Nezumi and his sister – play in, get lost in, find each other in, laughing and shrieking and jumping out to scare each other.

           He walked along the entire wall, went back and forth, finding names in one column on the left, then going to the right, then going back left, then names at the very top, and names at the very bottom. Names Nezumi hadn’t thought he remembered, names he’d thought he’d lost, but he hadn’t. He’d just needed someone to remember them for.

           Nezumi was aware a small crowd of tourists had gathered now, people listening to him talk about the Gin Dynasty in a way that it had never been talked about, not by any of the tour guides, not by any of the historians in the documentaries on the Great Slaughter that Nezumi knew existed but had never watched. Nezumi didn’t care about these other people listening. He spoke for Shion, and Shion followed him, crouched down beside him as Nezumi touched the lowest names, stood on his toes to see the names Nezumi pointed to at the top of the wall.

           Nezumi did not know all the names. There were a lot of people in the Gin Dynasty. But it wasn’t just names he remembered. It was stories and afternoons and nursery rhymes and weekends and meals and his entire childhood.

           The crowd around the wall got large, and Nezumi had stopped finding names to point at, so Shion pulled Nezumi to the train station, and the entire ride back to Tokyo, Nezumi didn’t stop. He told Shion all that he remembered and made himself remember more when that ran out.

           He couldn’t give Shion his whole childhood. He wanted to, but he knew he couldn’t. There were years, and so much of it he was too young to remember.

           But he remembered enough. Enough to make Shion laugh that loud laugh of his. Enough to make Shion squeeze his hand tight while Nezumi reminded himself to breathe. Enough to make Shion wipe his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Enough to make Shion interrupt with a story of his own childhood. Enough to show Shion that it hadn’t all been bad.

           Nezumi’s life hadn’t all been bad, and sometimes it felt like that, so easily, it felt like that.

           By the time they got back home, it was late, nearly seven. Nezumi hadn’t eaten all day but often forgot to eat because Shion didn’t eat, and it was always Shion who had to remember for him.

           “Nezumi! You have to remember, you’re the human here,” Shion lectured, when Nezumi’s stomach grumbled as he fished in his pocket for their apartment key.

           “Don’t be so loud, we don’t know our neighbors,” Nezumi said back. His voice was hoarse from talking so much, though he’d gotten somewhat used to it, talking to Safu all day at the psych ward.

           To talk to Safu was an entirely different experience. She was professional. Stayed distant. Listened and didn’t interrupt and nodded at the right places and asked questions sometimes to prompt him if he fell silent.

           Shion listened loudly, closely, touching him, responding, crying often and sniffling and laughing even while he cried, interrupting and apologizing for interrupting and sometimes staying quiet when Nezumi quieted and not asking any questions at all and letting Nezumi start again when he felt like it.

           Nezumi found his key, opened their door, let Shion in first and followed, shedding his boots and jacket and sweater and unzipping his jeans before he got to the bedroom.

           “Where are you going? Come eat!” Shion shouted from the kitchen.

           “I’m changing!” Nezumi called back. He stripped to his boxers, pulled on a clean t-shirt and sweats and stopped at the bathroom to pee and look briefly at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror before returning to the kitchen, where Shion had pulled out what looked like half the fridge.

           “You have to remember to eat. Humans need to eat three meals a day.”

           “And how would you know anything about what humans have to do?” Nezumi asked him, coming behind him, wrapping his arms loosely around Shion’s waist and leaning his cheek on Shion’s shoulder. He watched over Shion’s shoulder as he threw things in a pot on the stove.

           “Don’t try to be cute. You’re always on me about eating enough, don’t be a hypocrite,” Shion replied.

           “I’m not trying to be cute. I am cute.”

           “I’m serious, Nezumi. With the new meds you’re on, Safu said you can get violently sick if you don’t eat a full meal when you take them. And they can make you lose weight, and you don’t really have weight to lose, you know.”

           Nezumi sighed, unwound his arms from Shion, stepped away from him, but before he could get far, Shion grabbed his arm.

           “Hey. Come back. You’re right. You are cute.”

            “Don’t appease me.”

            “I’m not. You’re the cutest person in Tokyo. In Japan. In Asia, probably, and that’s saying a lot, it’s a very populated continent. I’d say the world, but I think I’m partial to Australians. It’s the accents.”

            “You can stop now, professor,” Nezumi said, laughing, letting Shion pull him back into his arms. He tucked his face into Shion’s neck. Breathed him in deep. He smelled like the outdoors. Like Kyoto, like he’d brought some of it back with him.

            Shion spoke over his shoulder, into Nezumi’s hair. “I know you just want everything to go back to how it was, and I know I mess that up, I talk about your medications and ask about the side effects you’re experiencing and want to know what you and Safu talk about in your sessions. I’ll try not to do that anymore. I don’t want you to think I’m always worried or that all I see when I look at you are those scars on your wrists, because I’m not and I don’t. I do trust you. I’m not trying to walk on eggshells around you. I’m trying to get there too, to normalness. It’ll take time for me too, that’s all. It’s not just you who’s adjusting.”

            “I know.” Nezumi stepped back from Shion. Nodded at the stove. “You’ll burn my dinner, professor.”

            “Wait, I just want to say – I was having a hard time with this. It’s hard to say that, I didn’t want you to know that, that sometimes I thought the meds were making it worse, or sometimes I wanted to stop you from going to therapy because you’d come back from your sessions with Safu, and you’d seem so much worse, drained and like you’d been crying and you never talk to me about any of it.”

            Nezumi shook his head. “You just said you’d stop bringing this up.”

            Shion caught the hem of his t-shirt, held the fabric in his fist. “Nezumi, I know, I will. But I need you to know that today – today showed me that it’s working. I never thought I’d get to know some parts of you. I always figured that was just the reality of loving you, that there’d be parts of you I’d never get, and I had to accept that, and I did, I did accept it. But you gave me some of those parts today. I just wanted to tell you, I really want you to know, I’m proud of you. That’s all. I’m proud of you. And I’ll stop now, I’m done, I promise.”

            Shion’s fingers loosened from Nezumi’s t-shirt. He went to the stove then, turned it lower, flipped the omelet he’d put on. Nezumi watched his back, the movements of his shoulders, then stepped closer, beside him, slid his hand beneath Shion’s sweater so it rested on the hot skin of his lower back.

            “I’m cooking,” Shion said.

            “I’m not doing anything.”

            “You better not. You have to eat.”

            “I know,” Nezumi said, slipping his hand over Shion’s skin, just wanting to touch him, really. He was so warm. There’d been a time when he’d been skeletal, when he’d been so close to starvation, and it felt difficult to think of that time as reality.

            It felt difficult to think of anything as reality outside this very moment, Shion turning off the stove and moving away to get a plate so Nezumi’s hand slipped out from his under his shirt, then returning to slide the omelet from the pan to the plate, then sitting beside Nezumi at the counter and watching Nezumi eat and talking about how he’d incorporate the lesson plan he missed today with his next class’s lesson plan.

            This was reality, and this was Nezumi’s greatest want. To spend the rest of his life like this. It suddenly didn’t seem so impossible.

*


	35. Chapter 35

Nezumi had stolen roughly a year’s supply of blood for Shion at the end of August, so Shion knew, theoretically, if he continued to drink a pint of blood a day, he would finish his supply before his twenty-ninth birthday.

            A week had passed since Nezumi had taken him to Tokyo, which meant it was just a week into March. Shion had nearly six months of blood left.

            Having half a year of blood at once was more than Shion used to dream of, and to be able to drink a full pint a day had him feeling properly alive in a way that made it hard to believe he’d ever been scared of dying. But Shion used to stretch a pint of blood to weeks, to a month. It felt foolish, to drink a pint every morning. It was not endless. It would run out.

            Shion thought these things as he looked into his coffee mug of blood that morning. It was a Sunday, and Nezumi was still asleep. Shion had been awake for over an hour, had spent most of that hour watching Nezumi sleep beside him, at peace and untroubled, before Shion had forced himself out of bed to get an early start to the day, to drink his blood while he graded papers. He’d already graded three papers and drank half a pint of blood. His mug could only hold about half a pint, so Shion always had to refill it once, and he’d just refilled it but now stared into this second half of his daily pint, doubtful.

            Maybe it’d be best to start weaning himself off of it. He could pour some blood back into its bag. He could start drinking just three quarters of a pint a day. Then half a pint a day. Then less than half. He could build his tolerance back up for starvation, because soon it would come again. He couldn’t ignore that just because he had a half a year supply of blood in his kitchen. He should have already been rationing.

            He was still staring at this blood in his cup when he heard the bedroom door open, and then the sound of Nezumi peeing. Nezumi had a habit now of not closing the bathroom door, even when he used the bathroom and showered. Shion didn’t mind this but for when Nezumi took a shit, and Shion would walk by the open door to see the man sitting on the toilet with his jeans by his ankles and a book on his knees.

            It amazed him, partly, that Nezumi so willingly gave up this simple privacy, a privacy no one would expect him to give up. Shion wondered if it was a Step, the way writing in journals once a day was a Step, the way ceasing to wear the bandages that hid the warped skin of his wrists was a Step. Shion had asked Safu if using the bathroom with the door open was a Step, and she’d been so caught off guard she’d forgotten to lecture him about doctor-patient confidentiality and replied that of course shitting with an open door was not a Step.

            Shion tried not to ask Safu too many things about Nezumi anymore. Nezumi’s journal was kept in the drawer of the nightstand on his side of the bed, and once, when Nezumi had been at rehearsal, Shion had opened this drawer, touched the leather cover of the journal with the tips of his fingers, then quickly retracted his hand and closed the drawer.

            There was the flush of the toilet, and then the sink running. Shion knew he had to make his decision quickly. Nezumi would not be happy with the idea that he was rationing his blood, so that meant if he did it, he’d have to keep it a secret from Nezumi.

            Shion didn’t want secrets from Nezumi. That was another Step—offer the truth, even in small doses. The Steps were for Nezumi, of course, not Shion, but it only felt fair that Shion should reciprocate this particular Step as well.

            The faucet turned off before Shion had done anything with the blood in his mug, and then Nezumi was walking into the kitchen, pulling his hair up into a ponytail and looking sleepy.

            “G’morning,” he mumbled, walking to Shion and kissing him, getting blood on his lips and finishing the tying of his ponytail before wiping the back of one hand across his lips and opening the cabinet above the counter with his other hand.

            Nezumi’s medication was not a Step but a Mandate. His other Mandate was bi-weekly sessions with Safu. Unlike Steps, Mandates could not be decided on Nezumi’s own time. They were rules set by Safu. Nezumi followed his Mandates without complaint, just as he did his Steps.

            He popped his pill and swallowed it dry, twisting the lid of his prescription bottle closed. There were only a few pills left, Shion could tell from the sound they made when Nezumi shook the bottle as he replaced it in the cabinet.

            “Are you giving me the silent treatment, professor?” Nezumi asked, opening the door of the fridge and retrieving the half gallon of milk. He usually would have coffee in the mornings, but with the pills he was on now, caffeine made him sick.

            “Sorry, just thinking. Morning,” Shion said.

            “Thinking about what?”

            “Blood,” Shion said, after only a moment of hesitation. _Offer the truth, even in small doses._

            Nezumi glanced at him mid-reach for a cereal bowl. He looked away after a moment, retrieved the cereal bowl, set it on the counter beside the milk.

            “What about blood?”

            “It’s been half a year since you stole that blood for me,” Shion said, watching Nezumi go to the cupboard, take out the box of Captain Crunch.

            “I know.”

            Nezumi unclipped the bag clip, straightened out the bag so the opening was free, poured cereal in his bowl. Shion was worried about Nezumi’s nutrition, had been researching good nutrition online and knew the sugary cereals Nezumi had been mostly living on since he’d gotten out of the psychiatric hospital were not the kinds of things he should have been living on.

            Shion cooked for Nezumi often. Nezumi could cook for himself, Shion had seen him do it. Shion suspected Nezumi was a better cook than he was, but Nezumi hadn’t cooked anything for himself since his discharge. Shion tried asking Safu what this sudden lack of cooking meant, if it meant anything, but this time, he hadn’t caught Safu off guard, and she’d lectured him about doctor-patient confidentiality.

            “Even if I just cut my daily meal by half, I’d get another year out of what’s left,” Shion said carefully, waiting until Nezumi had finished pouring his milk over his cereal.

            Nezumi twisted the cap on the half gallon. Replaced the milk in the fridge so casually Shion couldn’t be sure if Nezumi had heard him or not.

            “If you want to eat half the amount you should, that’s up to you,” Nezumi said, finally looking at him again.

            Shion knew Nezumi’s sarcasm, and this was not it. Still, he watched the man with suspicion as Nezumi picked up his cereal bowl.

            “You’re not going to argue?”

            “You’re stubborn, it’s useless arguing with you. Is that your first mug or your second?”

            “It’s my second. I was thinking I’d drink half of it, so then I’d have had three quarters of a pint. Wean myself off,” Shion explained.

            Nezumi leaned against the counter and shoved a towering spoon of cereal into his mouth. His crunches were loud in the otherwise quiet kitchen. His cheeks bulged with the amount of cereal he’d filled them with. He’d missed a chunk of hair when he’d tied his ponytail, so a bunch of strands fell from the side of his head and curled over his shoulder, displaced from the rest.

            “Nezumi,” Shion said, when he finally finished chewing.

            “It’s up to you,” Nezumi said.

            “Be serious. I want to have a conversation about this. We have to be practical.”

            “I said it’s up to you. I am being serious.”

            Shion could make nothing of Nezumi’s expression. He looked like he always looked when he ate cereal in the mornings. A little sleepy still, mostly relaxed and calm. “Then I’m going to start doing three quarter pints,” Shion said slowly, almost as a question.

            “Okay,” Nezumi agreed. He put down his cereal bowl, then, and left the kitchen.

            Shion stared at the space of his absence, listened to try to figure out what Nezumi was doing. He could tell Nezumi had gone into the bedroom, but couldn’t make out much noise, and then Nezumi was returning, this time with his phone.

            He returned to where he’d stood against the counter, spooned another heaping spoon of Captain Crunch in his mouth, and crunched loudly while he did something on his phone.

            “What are you doing?” Shion asked. He held his mug in his hands still, uncertain. Today’s blood was woodsy and warm, blood that would be perfect for a cold day like a day from last week, but this week it was getting warmer despite still being the start of March.

            “One thousand four hundred seventy-five,” Nezumi said, after he finished chewing again. He showed Shion his phone, where the number _1,474.5_ was heading the top of his open calculator app. “I rounded up,” Nezumi added.

            “What is that?”

            “Seventy-five percent of my recommended calorie count. You can find out how many calories you’re supposed to eat online, Safu showed me, she’s worried about my diet. Which I know you put her up to, by the way,” Nezumi added, raising his eyebrows at Shion.

            Shion couldn’t think of a way to defend himself, but Nezumi didn’t seem upset.

            “If you’re going to eat seventy-five percent of what you need, so will I. When you wean it down, as you say, to half, then I’ll do the same.” Nezumi typed something else on his phone, turned it back around to show Shion another number on his calculator.

            _983._

            “I’ve already been counting calories, it’s another Step. I have an app and everything, so just let me know how much blood you’re drinking so I can adjust the max total value number in my app.”

            Shion set down his mug to cross his arms. “First of all, the calories you’re eating are all garbage anyway. Captain Crunch is not what Safu wants you to eat. Second, you’re being very childish about this, I can’t believe you actually fooled me for a second into thinking you’d be reasonable.”

            “And how am I being childish?” Nezumi asked, putting his phone down and taking another mouthful of cereal.

            “You have the means to be healthy, Nezumi, you have the privilege to walk into a grocery store and purchase as much food as you want. What good will it do for me if you cut yourself off from food alongside me? Is it the principle of it? I don’t need you to take some stance for me.”

            “I’m not taking a stance for you. You care about my health more than your own, so you’ll eat properly if that means I will. That’s all this is,” Nezumi said simply, picking up his cereal bowl with one hand, reaching out and slipping two fingers of his other hand in Shion’s waistband.

            He pulled Shion forward until their lips were nearly touching.

            “You may be a genius, professor, but don’t think you can outsmart me,” he said quietly, then kissed Shion, a deep kiss that had Shion breathless until Nezumi was abruptly gone from him, taking his cereal bowl to the other side of the counter where he sat on his stool.

            Shion picked up his mug. Took it to the counter and sat on his own stool, watching Nezumi flip through a few of the essays Shion had scattered on the counter.

            “Don’t mix up my piles,” he warned.

            “You’re going to give up that easily?” Nezumi asked, still flipping through an essay.

            “I haven’t given up. I anticipated possible responses you might have, but that wasn’t one of them. It caught me off guard.”

            “So you’re regrouping.”

            “Sure,” Shion agreed, sipping his blood.

            Nezumi looked at him with his spoon hanging out his mouth. He took the spoon out and pointed it at Shion. “Get the idea of rationing out of your head. That’s not your life anymore.”

            “You’re not stealing blood again. We discussed this. There’s no way you’re doing that again.”

            Nezumi hummed. The same hum he’d given Shion a week before, when Shion tried to make the man promise he’d never raid another hospital. The same hum he’d given Shion two weeks before, and a few days before that, and the week before that, and countless times before that.

            “Nezumi,” Shion warned, just as he had every time before.

            “Don’t worry, professor,” Nezumi said, just as he always had.

            Sometimes, Shion kept arguing with him. But other times, like this morning, he dropped it. He had about six months of blood left. He didn’t have to worry about this right now, not when Nezumi seemed to be in a good mood, not when today seemed to be a good day – on good days, Shion let any possible arguments drop.

            On good days, Shion did his best to keep them that way.

*

Because Nezumi was not a lead, his character was not in every scene of _Twelfth Night._ In fact, his character was in only three scenes, so he was not very often at the theater, and when he wasn’t, he was usually at the bakery.

            Safu had told him it was an important part of his recovery not to cover the scars on his wrists, and mostly, Nezumi had begun to leave them uncovered.

            At home, Shion sometimes traced the warped skin, kissed it when they made love. In therapy, Safu paid no attention to the damaged skin, not even to glance at it. At work, his cast members didn’t comment on it, though Nezumi knew their eyes lingered on his wrists, and they talked about him behind his back. But he didn’t particularly care about his coworkers, and make-up Misaki had already figured out a way to paint swatches of pale make-up over his skin so that it looked unblemished completely.

            It was Karan that Nezumi hid these scars from, sticking three band-aids in a stack over the inside of each wrist before each time he went to the bakery. Safu tried to make him talk about it, specifically why it was different letting Shion see his wrists compared to Karan, but Nezumi didn’t know why it was different.

            He didn’t want to make Karan sad, but it wasn’t like he wanted to make Shion sad either. He didn’t know what it was. Recently, Nezumi had been getting more and more annoyed in therapy. Talking in circles about things he didn’t have answers to. He thought that now, over a month since he’d been out of the psych ward, he didn’t really need therapy any longer. He felt better, mostly. Things were easier with Shion, normal more often than not. The meds he was on were working – at least, he didn’t have nightmares, and he could think about his family without freaking out.

            Still, he did everything Safu told him to and this meant continuing to go to sessions. Not going would make Shion worry, and Shion had worried enough.

            “We have a lull up front, so I set the bell out, mind if I join you?” Karan asked, coming through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

            Nezumi was crouching behind the counter and pointed at the cherry blossom tree he’d been icing along the wide of a cake.

            “It’s lopsided, right? Something seems uneven.”

            Karan walked around the counter and crouched beside Nezumi to look closely at it. “The left side has more branches but less flowers,” she said.

            Nezumi nodded, stood up and reached for the bag of pink icing.

            “What’s in the oven?” Karan asked, washing her hands at the sink now.

            Karan let Nezumi choose a specialty item on the days he was in the kitchen to add onto her usual menu. Usually, he tried recipes he wasn’t familiar with, some that Karan hadn’t even showed him how to bake. But today, he’d chosen one of the pies he’d found on a menu from Karan’s old menu pile. “Cherry pie.”

            “That was Shion’s favorite,” Karan said, turning off the faucet.

            “He told me.”

            “I rarely make it anymore,” Karan said, sounding wistful, and Nezumi turned to watch her open the oven, breathe in deep, close the oven door again. “It looks perfect, Nezumi, your lattice is wonderful.”

            “Thanks,” Nezumi said, about to turn back to his cherry blossom tree, but Karan’s hand was on his wrist before he could ice another flower.

            He pulled away instinctively, thinking she was trying to look at his band-aid-covered skin.

            “Oh, hon, I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Karan pressed her hands flat against the stomach of her apron.

            Nezumi shook his head, exhaling hard, realizing he’d overreacted and unsure how to explain himself, but Karan didn’t seem to expect an explanation.

            “Honey, I have to ask you something,” she said. Her voice was gentle as it always was, but serious now, too.

            Nezumi set the icing bag on the counter and slid his hands in the pocket of his apron so his wrists would be completely hidden. He nodded. He’d thought Karan wouldn’t push him for the details of what he’d done to himself in the psych ward, but he supposed she had to look out for her son, and maybe she thought this was information she needed.

            “Safu and I have been drawing blood for Shion every eight weeks. He does not know about this, and I think it’s best if it stays this way, but I won’t ask you to keep it from him if you want to tell him. I understand honesty is important to your progress you’re making with Safu, and I won’t interfere with that.”

            Nezumi blinked. He had not expected Karan’s words, and it took him a moment to process them. Karan was silent, watching him, until Nezumi finally understood.

            “You want me to draw blood too,” he said.

            “I know you haven’t been able to, you lost enough blood earlier this year. But Safu let me know this morning that two months have now passed since you last lost a significant amount of blood. She’s says as of today, it’s safe for you to donate.”

            Nezumi couldn’t look at Karan. He stared at the cake instead, his uneven cherry blossom tree. He didn’t have a problem donating blood for Shion. He wanted to give his blood. He should have been giving his blood to Shion instead of draining it pointlessly in that psych ward, making himself bleed stupidly, wasting the blood inside of him on the walls and floor of his room.

            “I don’t want you to misunderstand, hon,” Karan said softly. “Safu and I don’t talk about you like this behind your back, please don’t think that we do. I only asked her if it would be a detriment to your health to donate blood, and she agreed to let me know when you were clear. Safu refused to ask you herself, she insisted it would take advantage of her relationship with you as your doctor. But I have to ask you. It’s my son, Nezumi. He has so much blood now, and that’s because of you, but I have to think about the future. Knowing he’s healthy now isn’t good enough for me. I want him to live forever.”

            Nezumi didn’t look away from the cake when he replied. “How much blood have you collected?”

            “Between the two of us, Safu and I could only draw six pints in the six months it’s been since he’d been drinking the blood you got him from the hospital. It seems like nothing compared to what he has now.”

            It did seem like nothing. Six pints wasn’t even enough for a week, but Nezumi knew Shion used to stretch a pint up to a month.

            He looked at Karan then. “He wants to start rationing the blood he has now. The hospital blood.”

            Karan didn’t say anything. Nezumi wanted her to feel the anger he did.

            “He’s supposed to drink a full pint a day. It’s on all the vamp forums,” Nezumi reminded, hearing his own voice harden.

            “I know what my son is supposed to be drinking, hon,” Karan said slowly.

            “When he runs out, I’ll get him more. There won’t be any more of that slow starvation he used to put himself through.”

            Karan’s gaze was hard as it rarely ever was. “Nezumi, I know I’m not your mother, and I know you’re a grown man. I know I cannot tell you what to do, but I truly hope you are not implying you intend to steal blood from another hospital. You did not get away with it the first time, and you won’t get away with it if you try again.”

            Nezumi freed his hands from his apron pocket, crossed his arms. “I did get away with it. He has blood, doesn’t he?”

            “And you have those scars on your wrists,” Karan said carefully, her gaze not leaving his own.

            Nezumi took a step back from her, but Karan didn’t seem to notice, her eyes crinkling, a crease appearing between them, the hard expression dissolving into something else, something almost hopeless.

            “I can barely look at you anymore, Nezumi, and I hate myself for this. But how can I face you? How can I even speak to you? How can I ask you to sacrifice more of you?”

            “What are you talking about?” Nezumi breathed. He felt gutted at the sudden desperation on Karan’s face, the sudden change in her tone, the suddenness of this confession he didn’t understand. He preferred her resolution to this, whatever it was that was happening now.

            Karan stepped closer to him, closing the gap he’d made. “I don’t even want to turn back time. If I could, if I could stop you from going to that hospital, if I could stop you from taking that blood, if I could stop everything that happened afterward because of that – the JBVIC taking you, that Momoe torturing you, the trauma you’ve experienced, the hurt you’ve endured, the sadness and pain and grief – even if I could stop all of that, go back in time and prevent all of that, I don’t think I would,” Karan said, her voice breaking, her eyes shining. Her hands were in fists around the pale blue fabric of her apron.

            Nezumi couldn’t catch his breath. Couldn’t think of a word to say to her, but he didn’t have to, as she kept going.

            “Shion hasn’t eaten properly since he was a child, and now, now he’s so healthy. I didn’t think he’d ever be healthy again – alive, but not healthy. You gave him that, and in return, you nearly gave him your life. Everything that has happened to you in the last few months is a consequence of you giving my son a chance to live properly. And now I’m asking you to sacrifice more? I’m asking you to give him more? To give me more? I didn’t know I could be such a person. So selfish. So careless.”

           “Karan, you’re not – ”

           “You have to know how much I’ve come to care about you. I do, Nezumi, I do, I hope you believe me, I never meant to love you, you were a man I was terrified of the first time I saw you with my son, I was convinced you would only cause him hurt, and I have never been more wrong about anything in my life. I do love you, Nezumi, please believe me, I don’t want you to hurt anymore, but I have to keep Shion alive. I didn’t protect him from the vamp that bit him when he was a baby, I couldn’t do that for him, so now I have to – ”

            “Karan, stop!”

            Karan was not crying. She was shouting, her hands in fists, and Nezumi could not remember seeing her look so angry as she did then, every line of her face sharp. Her anger looked like Shion’s, and Nezumi didn’t know why this surprised him.

            “He was just a baby, and I didn’t protect him!” Karan shouted.

            If it was Shion, Nezumi would have shouted back. Would have gotten angry at the man’s stupidity, his constant naivety, his misunderstanding of basic truths, his need to take responsibility for what was not his fault.

            But Nezumi didn’t know how to be angry with Karan. He didn’t know how to yell at her. Beneath her anger that looked so much like Shion’s, she was still Karan. A woman who’d taken him into her family even before she fully trusted him. A woman who’d loved him even when he’d done nothing to deserve this love.

            So Nezumi didn’t shout back at her. He reached out to her, held the tops of her arms and looked at her closely and spoke very calmly. “If you blame yourself for what happened to Shion, then I have to blame myself for what happened to my family.”

            Karan shook her head, her hands around Nezumi’s wrists now, fingers digging into the band-aids, but Nezumi hardly noticed.

            “You were a child. I was the adult. Parents have to protect their children, and I haven’t protected him. He would have starved if you hadn’t given him your blood all those months ago when you were still terrified of him. He would be starving now if you hadn’t stolen that blood for him. You were tortured, and you still kept his secret. And now I’m asking you for more.”

            “You’re not asking me for anything. You’ve kept him alive for twenty years, Karan, you did that. You kept him alive so I could find him, you taught him to love unconditionally so he could teach me. You will never be in debt to me, and I can’t stand that you think that way, Karan. I really can’t. You’ve given me a family, and you’ve given me a life. You’ve given me everything.”

            Karan stared at him for several seconds, then looked down at her hands around Nezumi’s wrists. Her fingers slid over Nezumi’s band-aids, and immediately, he let go of her shoulders, freed his wrists from her light touch.

            “I’m better now. And if Safu said I can donate, then I’ll do it today. Will you take my blood, or should I go to Safu’s?”

            Karan just looked at him, no longer angry, no longer looking like her son, no longer looking like herself either. He wasn’t sure who she looked like. Someone tired and worried, and Nezumi realized she hid this part of herself when Shion was around, she didn’t want Shion to know that all these years, her worry for him had nearly consumed her.

            “Safu’s hands are steadier,” Karan finally said, quietly, just as the timer went off, and she jumped.

            “The cherry pie,” Nezumi told her. He’d never thought Karan looked old before, but he saw it now. Her age. What the years of having a vamp for a son had carved into her.

            Karan opened the oven, slipped on oven mitts, and took out the pie. She closed the oven door before setting the pie on the counter. She slid off one oven mitt and touched the lattice top with the tip of her finger.

            “Perfect,” she whispered, and Nezumi thought she sounded so extremely sad that he instantly regretted making this pie that used to be Shion’s favorite, back when he was a human, back when even his father had been alive, back when Karan’s family was whole.

*

The problem with rationing blood without telling Nezumi was that Shion would have to find somewhere to hide the quarter or half bags of blood he saved for the next day.

            When Nezumi was at rehearsal, Shion scoured the apartment for places to hide the blood. In his search, he found a leather notebook, just like the notebook Nezumi wrote in before bed as one of his Steps. Except that this notebook was not in the drawer of his nightstand. This notebook was at the top shelf of Nezumi’s side of the closet, standing upright and pressed flat against the wall behind a stack of books.

            Shion knew better than to open it. He’d never read from Nezumi’s notebook that was inside the drawer of his nightstand, but that notebook was not a secret.

            This one was. What if Nezumi admitted in this notebook that he still wanted to hurt himself? What if Nezumi wrote in this notebook of terrible thoughts he had, thoughts like the kinds that had led him to bite through the skin of his own wrists? What if these were words he’d never even given to Safu in his sessions?

            There were more _What ifs_ , Shion was certain of it, but he didn’t bother trying to list them. He forgot about his search for a hiding place for his blood and opened the notebook, still standing on the chair he’d pulled in from the kitchen so he could reach the top shelf.

_Shion. If you’ve found this, please don’t read it. It’s for me, it’s just to help me, that’s all it is. I’m asking you not to read it. Trust me._

_Yours,_

_N_

The note was written in the middle of the first page. Shion felt his knees nearly give out, stepped off the chair and sat on it instead. Read the note three more times, touched the words with his fingers, then closed his eyes tight, flipped the page, and opened his eyes again.

            _If Shion is home:_

_Do you really want to do this when Shion is home? Do you really want him to live with the guilt forever, knowing he was in the very next room when you did this? Do you really think you can get away with it if he’s in the apartment? Don’t you think he’ll smell the blood the moment your skin breaks? Unless you’re planning on taking pills. Then he won’t know. Then you can get away with it. Then you can kill yourself and let Shion find you dead, go ahead and do that to him, the only person who’s ever given a shit about you, go ahead and let him walk in on your dead body – where, on the bed he’s supposed to sleep in? Let him walk in on that, let him wonder if you’re just asleep, let him hope you’re just asleep, let him see the empty pill bottles on the nightstand and let him find out with fingers checking your pulse that you’re not just asleep, let him feel the way you did with your fingers on Mom’s pulse. You want to do that? You want to traumatize the best person in this goddamn world just because you feel like shit? Do it then. Kill yourself while he’s in the next room and let him find you and let him have nightmares about his fingers on your pulse and the nothingness he’ll feel, let him have nightmares for the rest of his life, fuck him up the way you’re fucked up so one day he’s the one killing himself. Ruin him after he loved you more than you ever deserved. Ruin him after he let you love him. If you really want to do it, go ahead, kill him too._

_But you don’t want to kill him. You don’t want to hurt him. He’s home, so go and find him. You don’t have to talk about this. Is he working on lesson plans in the living room? Grading essays? Just go sit next to him. Just touch him, be near him, lean against him. Ask him what he’s doing – he’ll ramble on, you know him, he’ll distract you._

_Is he asleep? Wake him up. Pretend you were asleep and elbow him hard in the stomach and wake him up. Talk to him about anything. Make up a dream you had. Have sex with him. Do anything but this, don’t do this to him. Don’t do this to him. You can’t do this to him._

            The handwriting got worse as it went on, more slanted and sloppy and unintelligible, but Shion had practice deciphering Nezumi’s scrawl, and he made out every word. 

            By the end of the first page, Shion could not breathe. He held the book open with one hand and pressed his other tight against his lips. He didn’t let himself catch his own breath before he flipped the page again.

            _If Shion isn’t home:_

            _Just fucking breathe for a second and think about this. Call him and if he doesn’t pick up, listen to his voicemail, that silly message of his. Listen to how happy he sounds, he practically chirps out that “Hi!” at the beginning, right? He’s adorable and carefree and so goddamn happy, and you’ll take that away from him if you do this. You’ll take his happiness away and his stupid goofy grins. Do you want to take that away? Do you want to die more than you want him to be happy? Is that what you want?_

_If he won’t pick up, if he’s in class, why don’t you go visit him? Sit in one of his lectures. Let his talk of whatever nonsense he’s teaching today distract you. Maybe he’s in the bakery – go there, bake a goddamn cake instead of killing yourself, isn’t that the better fucking option? Don’t worry about Karan seeing you like this. She won’t say anything. Just find him. There’s a reason you’re alive, and it’s him, and you know that. Whatever shit you feel right now is worth going to bed beside him tonight. You know that. This is just a reminder, but you know that. You don’t really want to die, and you know that too. There’s no such thing as an afterlife, there’s just death and nothingness, you won’t see Mom and Dad or anyone if you do this, you know that, don’t even try to be hopeful because it won’t work out that way. Don’t fucking kid yourself. Don’t kill yourself for that family when you have a new one now._

_Call Shion again. Call him until he comes home. He’ll be home soon. Wait for him. Don’t be dead when he gets back. Don’t be dead._

            Shion flipped the page again, but he didn’t have a chance to read a word of the mass of writing on this one, as there was a voice behind him.

            “There’s a note telling you explicitly not to read that.”

            Shion jumped out of the chair, threw the notebook across the room as he did so. He pressed his hand against his chest to keep in his startled heart, which beat too thickly for him to even hear his own rapid breaths.

            Nezumi was in the doorway and made no reaction to Shion’s leap out of the chair. He walked into the bedroom, not to Shion, but to the notebook Shion had tossed. He opened it, turned the inside of it toward Shion.

            “See. Or did you skip the first page?” Nezumi asked.

            Shion shook his head. He could assume Nezumi was holding the notebook open to the page where he’d written the note to him, but Shion didn’t dare look at the book. He stared at Nezumi’s face and saw nothing there but calm. It wasn’t the livid calm that Nezumi could offer, it wasn’t the fake calm that accompanied Nezumi’s sarcasm. It was a normal calm, a peaceful calm, but Shion thought maybe he was just misreading Nezumi’s expression, maybe his rampant heart that shook his entire body was affecting his vision too.

            Nezumi raised an eyebrow at his silence, then closed the book, looked down at it for a moment, then back at Shion. “It’s for when calling Safu doesn’t work. A last resort. Safu’s idea. It’s not a big deal, but I know you’re about to make it one, so go ahead, say what you have to.”

            Shion opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Shouldn’t you be mad at me?” he asked, his voice sounding smaller than he’d intended it.

            Nezumi shrugged. “I wasn’t hiding it from you. I don’t want it in plain sight because it’s a reminder that I had suicidal thoughts, which I don’t care to be reminded of at all times.”

            “But the note – the note for me telling me not to read it – ”

            “So you did see that.”

            “I – Yes, but – ” Shion shook his head, stepped closer to Nezumi, but there was still half the room between them. “I’m sorry, I just – I didn’t know if – ”

            Nezumi’s lips twitched. His smile was small but it still stole Shion’s voice.

            “You look so terrified, professor, are you really that scared of me? I’m not going to yell at you.”

            Shion shook his head. His heart still beat too loudly and shook all of his body. “But – ”

            “Stop protesting, do you want me to be mad at you?” Nezumi asked, laughing, and Shion couldn’t make sense of his laugh – could a man who’d written such things laugh so easily? Could a man who might at any moment have the urge to kill himself laugh like this?

            He didn’t have time to make sense of it. Nezumi walked closer, closed the distance between them, reached out and slinked his arm around Shion’s waist, pulled Shion’s body to his own, his other hand touching the side of Shion’s face.

           “I’d rather you hadn’t read it, but honestly, I forget most of what I wrote in this thing. I wrote it the morning after I moved in here, and I’ve never had to look at it since.”

           “You haven’t?” Shion asked, letting Nezumi pull him closer, tucking his face into Nezumi’s neck and speaking into his pale skin.

           He could feel when Nezumi shook his head against Shion’s own. “I know you think it’s been bad, but it hasn’t. I’m getting better, I promise. It doesn’t look like progress to you, but that’s because you didn’t see me at my worst. Trust me, this is progress. I was in a bad place in the psych ward, a place bad enough that Safu and I thought a notebook like this would be necessary. But since I’ve gotten out, I haven’t considered killing myself. I won’t ever again. You don’t have to worry.”

           Nezumi spoke all these words over Shion’s shoulder, and part of Shion wanted to pull back, to be able to look at Nezumi’s face as he said these things, but Shion only burrowed deeper into Nezumi’s body, winding his own arms around Nezumi’s waist.

           “I know you’re making progress,” he mumbled into Nezumi’s skin.

           “Then stop being worried.”

           “It’s not so easy to just stop.”

           Nezumi said nothing to this, and then he was leaning away from Shion, so Shion unearthed his face from the side of Nezumi’s neck, looked at him.

           “Should I be asking you why you were even looking around my side of the closet?” Nezumi asked, after a moment.

           Shion bit his lip.

           “Professor.”

            Shion reminded himself that lying wouldn’t help Nezumi’s progress. “I was looking for places to hide opened bags of blood. So I could ration without telling you.”

            Nezumi’s eyes narrowed only slightly. He didn’t take his arms away from around Shion, which Shion thought was a good sign.

            “It’s not going to last forever, and you can’t steal again. I’ll have to go back to how I got blood before, suppliers like Discreet Meat, which aren’t easy to find. And they’re expensive. And they’re not fully reliable – sometimes suppliers run out of blood too, and there’s no other option but to wait until they can fill my order, however long that might take.”

            “You’ve explained this to me a hundred times,” Nezumi replied.

            “But you’re still unreasonable when I tell you I have to start rationing.”

            “It’s not unreasonable to want you in good health, which I have explained to you a hundred times as well. I’m tired of this conversation. Let’s have a new one.”

            Shion wanted to argue, but Nezumi was right – they had argued about this, if not a hundred times, then close to it.

            Nezumi was in a good mood – a mood not ruined by the fact that Shion had read his secret notebook – and Shion wanted to retain that.

            He felt guilty for this, constantly hoarding Nezumi’s happiness. He wanted to treat Nezumi how he had before, not like some fragile thing, someone sensitive and volatile, someone who needed to be protected and appeased.

            He knew it was just time they needed. Shion wanted time to pass as much as he wanted it to stop – the more time passed, the better Nezumi seemed, and the more Shion trusted him. But the more time passed, the less blood Shion had. Each day, a bag less. It felt impossible to ignore, impossible to keep going this way, a bag a day. He felt so healthy, so alive; if he kept going like this for much longer, he didn’t know how he’d be able to give the feeling up.

            “I can see the gears churning as you attempt to think of a new topic, but I’m getting impatient,” Nezumi said, his hand coming beneath Shion’s chin, cupping his jaw and lifting Shion’s face an inch or so. “How about I choose the topic?”

            “Go ahead then,” Shion allowed, relieved when Nezumi kissed him.          

            Sex was one of the only distractions that was still effective in overshadowing Shion’s thoughts about his steadily diminishing blood supply. And as much as Shion knew they couldn’t ignore the looming end of his food supply, he craved any distraction he could get.

*

Nezumi was spent after sex – more than usual, as he’d just donated blood earlier in the day at Safu’s apartment, and was exhausted from that.

            She’d taken more than a pint from him, on his insistence. A two hundred milliliters more. She’d been doing the same with her own donations, but Karan wasn’t to know about it, and Nezumi agreed on that front.

            “Another round?” Shion asked, and Nezumi could tell, though he’d just closed his eyes, that the man was hovering over him.

            Nezumi opened his eyes. Shion’s hair was wet at the hairline with sweat. Nezumi had helped him touch up his roots just the day before, but he still found himself looking for white, a habit.

            Shion’s pubic hair was white, the only part of his vamp identity he left unchanged. A secret between himself and Nezumi.

            “That silent look you’re giving me means yes, right?” Shion asked, already slipping his leg over Nezumi’s waist, straddling him the next moment, hands on either side of Nezumi’s shoulders.

            Nezumi was on his back. Looked up at Shion, whose lower body rested against Nezumi’s, but he held himself up from Nezumi’s chest by his arms.

            “I can’t read our mind, vamps can’t do that, you know, that’s a myth,” Shion murmured, leaning down, his arms bending at the elbows to bring him lower. He kissed Nezumi just below his lips, then lower, down the underside of his chin, in a trail to his neck.

            Nezumi breathed and felt Shion kiss lower. His clavicles. His chest. His ribs, his navel, his waist, his thighs. Not going in any sort of straight line, at Nezumi’s knee before he rose back up, this time with a destination, and Nezumi let Shion blow him for only half a minute before he reached down, hand finding Shion’s soft, sweaty hair.

            “Come back up, professor.”

            “Mm?” Shion voice vibrated against him, and Nezumi’s breath hitched, but he leaned up on his elbows, reached lower to cup Shion’s jaw and pull him up that way.

            “What?” Shion asked, sitting up, still straddling Nezumi, who was sitting up too now.

            Shion wiped the back of his hand over his lips. Nezumi wondered sometimes if he was trying to cram as much sex as he could into this year, this year when he had blood – or, really, the half year that was left.

            When the blood ran out, he’d grow weak again. Nezumi remembered easily how skinny Shion had been, how easily exhausted, rarely able to have sex at the worst points of his starvation, and even when he insisted he could, Nezumi refused to, worried he would break the man.

            Nezumi shook his head. Wiped his thumb across Shion’s lips even though there was nothing there. “Nothing,” he said, leaning closer, kissing him.

            Shion’s fingers fell into his hair. He was heavy on Nezumi’s lap, thighs sliding over Nezumi’s, both of their laps slick with sweat. He was well-fed with the proper body mass for a man of his height and age. Nezumi loved the feel of his weight. Wouldn’t have minded if it was more. If it was crushing.

            Shion stopped kissing him, left his hands in Nezumi’s hair. “You’re kissing me in a very distracted way.”

            “I’m not.”

            “I know you, and I know how you kiss, and it’s not like this.”

            “You sound ridiculous,” Nezumi said, falling back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and feeling Shion’s weight shift over his thighs until he was gone.

            Nezumi wanted to close his eyes and sleep. The more-than-recommended blood he’d given had left him exhausted. He’d slept at Safu’s for two hours before coming home, but he still felt wrung out.

            Instead of closing his eyes, Nezumi turned his head to look at Shion, who stretched out to lie beside him, elbow against the mattress and cheek in his palm so that he looked down at Nezumi.

            “Is it because I read your secret notebook?” Shion asked, after a moment.

            “No. I don’t care about that.”

            “So it’s about what we’re not talking about because we’ve talked about it a hundred times.”

            Shion had taken out his contacts as he’d undressed, like they were part of his clothing. He was red eyed and part of the scar on his cheek was visible, as he’d given a half-hearted swipe at it with his palm to rub it off so Nezumi wouldn’t get foundation on his face when he kissed him.

            “I told you, professor, nothing is wrong. I’m just tired. We’ve discussed the need to moderate your unnaturally demanding sex drive before, have we not?”

            Shion’s eyes slid slowly over Nezum’s features, cataloguing him the same way Nezumi catalogued Shion.

            “You do look tired,” Shion said, reaching out, touching the skin underneath one of Nezumi’s eyes, like there were bags there he was tracing. “You were at the bakery today, right?”

            Karan would corroborate the lie in the name of keeping their blood donations secret, but Nezumi was trying not to lie. “I visited Safu a bit.”

            Shion’s eyes narrowed. “For therapy?”

            “Just to talk.”

            “Are you okay?”

            “I’m great,” Nezumi said, seeing Shion’s concern, not knowing how to get rid of it. He reached up, touched Shion’s lips with his thumb. “I can’t keep asking you to trust me, professor. You need to do it on your own now.”

            Shion caught Nezumi’s hand before Nezumi could drop it from Shion’s face, held it against his cheek. “I’m amazed you’re not annoyed with me for worrying about you so much.”

            “Who said I wasn’t annoyed? I certainly am,” Nezumi said, flattening his fingers between Shion’s own hand and Shion’s cheek.

            “No, you’re not,” Shion said, but he said so quietly, as if coming to a realization rather than arguing.

            Nezumi let Shion look at him carefully for a minute longer, then slid his hand free from Shion’s palm and cheek. He closed his eyes again. “Can we sleep now?”

            “Did you eat?”

            “I ate at Safu’s,” Nezumi said, which was true. She insisted he eat immediately after she drew his blood. “It’s in my app, you can look at it.”

            “I trust you,” Shion said, settling beside him, half of his body draped over Nezumi’s chest and waist, and Nezumi peeked at him, caught a hint of Shion’s grin. “You didn’t brush your teeth.”

            “Neither did you.”

            “I haven’t eaten since this morning, and after I ate, I brushed my teeth. You shouldn’t base your teeth brushing habits off mine.”

            “What are you, my dentist?” Nezumi asked back, closing his eyes again.

            “Speaking of dentists, you should make an appointment. And a doctor’s appointment. What kind of insurance does Kage give you guys? How come I never see you going to the doctor?”

            “You never go to the doctor,” Nezumi replied. He wanted to hold his hand over Shion’s lips to stop him from talking so he could go to sleep, but he was too tired to lift his arms.

             “How can I go to the doctor? Maybe we should compare insurance plans. Mine is pretty good since I have tenure. If we got married, you could get on mine.”

            Nezumi had mostly stopped listening, but he couldn’t tune everything out and opened his eyes again. “Did you just say married?”

            Shion’s own eyes were closed. “Never mind, same-sex marriage isn’t legal here. And I can’t get a passport, so we can’t fly to America.”

            Nezumi didn’t point out also that level-three vamp screenings were required for marriage licenses—a fact he’d discovered only accidentally while researching vamps. It wasn’t like he actually cared about marriage, it wasn’t like he’d actually considered it before learning about the vamp screenings.

            “Maybe I’ll still call you my husband though. What do you think?” Shion asked now, and Nezumi excused the complete nonsense of it because Shion sounded sleepy now too, maybe he just wasn’t thinking.

            “If that makes you happy, I won’t stop you,” Nezumi replied, still watching Shion’s closed eyelids.

            “And we could get rings. Symbolically.”

            “You’re just talking in your sleep at this point, right?”

            “We can think about it,” Shion said, as if the matter was settled. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly so that his exhale fell against Nezumi’s shoulder.

            Nezumi didn’t close his eyes again. He no longer felt tired at all. He watched Shion and wished he’d donated even more blood – the little he’d given wasn’t enough. He’d never be able to give this man enough.

*


	36. Chapter 36

Shion was naked in the bathroom applying _Natural Sand_ when Nezumi walked in. “Morning.”

            “I’m in here,” Shion said, while Nezumi went to the toilet and lowered the front of his boxers.

            “You left the door open, that means I can come in.”

            “No, that means I have to let the steam from my shower air out of the bathroom so I don’t sweat off my foundation,” Shion said, over the stream of Nezumi’s pee.

            Instead of replying, Nezumi flushed the toilet, then walked out the bathroom only to walk in a second later.

            “Good morning, Shion,” he said, and Shion looked away from the skin of his own hip where he was evening out _Natural Sand_ to stare at him.

            “What are you doing?”

            “Giving you another chance to be cordial this morning.”

            Shion stopped himself from rolling his eyes. “Can you get my back?”

            “Who’s undressing you at school that you need to cover yourself like this?” Nezumi asked, taking the tube of foundation and turning Shion by his shoulders.

            “I have to be careful. They could do randomized level one screenings any day on us, it’s part of my contract.” Shion closed his eyes. Focused on the feeling of Nezumi’s fingers, warm still from sleep, rubbing the cool foundation over his back.

            “I have to tell you a frustration,” Nezumi said, fingers slipping lower to Shion’s hips.

            Shion nodded. Another Step. Nezumi had to tell him what Safu called “frustrations,” but they could be anything negative that he was feeling. It was meant to help Nezumi get into the habit of sharing his feelings. A related Step was sharing his “gratitudes” – anything positive – and Shion loved these. The last one had been two days ago, when Nezumi’s gratitude had been, _Since you said that insane shit about marriage a week ago, it’s been stuck in my head. I want that stuff. Husband and rings. I want it too, and I like that you want it._

            Nezumi only had to say one frustration and one gratitude a week, whenever he wanted. Shion looked forward to the gratitudes and always felt some trepidation about the frustrations, but despite that, he looked forward to them too. Every admission was another secret from Nezumi, another thing about the man that Shion got to hoard, a collection of facts and feelings.

            “I want a better role in _Twelfth Night._ I hate not being a lead. Now that we’re not just in rehearsals but shows have actually started, it’s getting on my nerves being in only four scenes. What do minor roles do during shows? Stand around back stage? For basically the whole night? What is the point of that? I don’t like that you and Karan come to my shows either. Why bother when I’m on stage for fifteen minutes the whole night? Don’t waste your nights anymore.”

            Nezumi was allowed to choose if Shion could comment on his frustrations and gratitudes. After his gratitude about marriage two nights before, he’d said, _Don’t comment,_ so Shion had had to keep quiet about the way his chest was bursting with Nezumi’s admission.

            Today, as his fingers trickled down to Shion’s thigh, Nezumi didn’t say, _Don’t comment,_ so Shion said, “We’re not wasting our nights, Mom and I both like the theater. Of course, we like it more when you’re in every scene, but we still enjoy ourselves. So don’t worry about us.”

            Shion turned to see that Nezumi was crouching, touching his fingers to Shion’s calf. Shion had already put foundation on his leg, but he let Nezumi touch him anyway, apply an extra coat anyway. They didn’t have money to waste on foundation, but it couldn’t be a waste to have Nezumi trail his fingers so carefully over his skin.

            “Watching you the past week in this minor role, it still feels like you’re the star, you know. Every scene you’re in, you steal the spotlight. You weren’t at your peak for auditions, but in the weeks of rehearsal, you’ve progressed back to your old ability. Next show, you’ll get the lead again, I’m certain of it.”

            Nezumi stood up, and Shion turned around fully. Watched Nezumi’s gaze trace the scar on his cheek down to his neck, the only parts of it still uncovered.

            Nezumi squeezed the tube so foundation pooled on the back of his hand, touched two fingers of his other hand into the pool, then raised his fingers to touch Shion’s neck.

            “Or you could talk to Kage. I’m sure he sees what I see. He might recast you, you have the play memorized. You’d make an incredible Viola.”

            “I did talk to him.”

            “You did?”

            “Don’t talk, I’m about to do your face.”

            “When did you talk to him? You didn’t tell me.”

            Nezumi shrugged. “He said no. Said he knew I could do it, but I didn’t need the pressure of being a lead so soon after…everything.”

            Shion said nothing. Nezumi’s fingers were on his cheek now.

            “I like pressure. What I don’t like is standing backstage doing nothing for the majority of the show,” Nezumi said. His eyes were concentrated on Shion’s face, and Shion knew why Nezumi was telling him his frustration now. Now, he had an excuse not to look Shion in the eye. He always said his frustrations when he had excuses not to look at Shion directly – when he was in the shower, over the phone, when they were in the bakery and Nezumi could pretend to be concentrating on an icing design.

            “Ophelia isn’t a lead, and you like her. Maybe you just have to find something you like with Antonio. A way to connect with him. That shouldn’t be that hard,” Shion suggested, the moment Nezumi’s fingers left his skin, and Nezumi paused with his fingers halfway to Shion’s cheek, gaze meeting Shion’s now.

            Shion smiled – lightly, so as not to displace the skin beneath Nezumi’s fingers, which were back on his cheek now.

            “Just imagine I’m Sebastian,” Shion said, unable to help himself from smiling wider now, feeling Nezumi lift his fingers from his cheek again to let him speak. “I know that’s what I imagine, every time you stand up there and say, ‘If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant.’ It makes me want to roleplay, that line. It could be a fun, you know, Antonio is very self-sacrificing in his love, willing to throw his life away – shouldn’t be hard to roleplay, should it?”

            Shion bit his lip to stop himself from laughing while Nezumi looked at him coolly.

            “You really amuse yourself quite a bit, don’t you?” Nezumi finally said, turning from Shion to cap the foundation tube then wash his hands at the sink.

            Shion looked at his own reflection in the mirror behind Nezumi, making sure Nezumi had done a good enough job with the make-up on his face.

            “Maybe,” Shion replied, tilting his face and standing on his tiptoes in order to see all of his face and neck above Nezumi’s shoulder.

            Nezumi stopped washing his hands, stepped out of the mirror’s way so Shion could properly look at himself. He only gave Shion half a minute to do this, though, until he tilted Shion’s face toward his, two fingers on the side of Shion’s jaw free of _Natural Sand._

            “Thank you for listening to my frustration, professor,” he said, which he always said after he shared his frustrations. Shion wasn’t sure if this was part of the Step, or just something Nezumi did for his own reasons.

            “You’re welcome,” Shion said, which he always said back. Sometimes he considered giving Nezumi a frustration of his own, and he’d asked Safu about it, if that was something he should be doing, if it was only fair for him to share himself with Nezumi for each thing Nezumi shared with him.

            _It’s up to you,_ Safu had said. _But this isn’t about you. This is about Nezumi. You’ve never had a problem being honest with yourself to others, vamp stuff notwithstanding, of course. Nezumi has. He probably knows most things about you anyway, since you naturally would have told him over the course of how long you’ve known him. Sharing your feelings and thoughts is easy for you, so it’s not really equal to what Nezumi’s doing anyway, I don’t know if I’d call that a fair exchange. Instead of telling him something about yourself, do something for him that’s hard for you._

            She hadn’t elaborated on what that something might be, and Shion had yet to come up with it.

            But he was trying. He’d figure it out, what might be as hard for him as confessing these truths was for Nezumi – as simple as many of these truths seemed. Shion knew it wasn’t simple. Shion knew it wasn’t easy. No matter how easy Nezumi made it look, no matter how obliging Nezumi seemed when it came to his Steps, Shion knew they took effort, Shion knew Nezumi was not comfortable, Shion knew Nezumi was inwardly fighting against his own objections with every frustration and gratitude he shared.

            “I always hated that line,” Nezumi said, fingers off Shion’s cheek, at the doorway now, turning back to glance at Shion, who was bending now to replace his foundation under the sink.

            Shion stood up straight. “What line?”

            Nezumi repeated the same line Shion had quoted previously – “ ‘If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant.’ ”

            “I like it,” Shion replied.

            Nezumi looked at him, that way he always had – a lingering look, like Shion was something that had to be figured out even though, by now, Nezumi knew every single one of Shion’s secrets, even the deepest, darkest ones.

            “You’re right. I guess I can connect with Antonio,” Nezumi finally said, then left the doorway so Shion was naked in the bathroom alone again.

            Shion looked in the mirror again, examined his disguise – almost human. He never put his contacts in until right before he left for work – he knew Nezumi liked his red eyes best.

*

Nezumi spent more and more time researching ways to get blood. Since vamp banks became illegal after the Great Slaughter, there seemed to be five main options: online blood suppliers, blood donations from family and friends, stealing from hospitals, nonconsensual bleedings, and murder.

            Online blood suppliers were the best option, but none had cropped up after Shion’s old supplier, Discreet Meat, got busted and the vamps who’d run it were executed without trial.

            Nezumi, Karan, and Safu were already doing donations, but that wasn’t a great option. There was only so much blood a human could donate, and that blood was not enough.

            Nezumi could pull off another blood heist from another hospital. He knew hospital security was likely much higher in all of Japan after his first heist at Tokyo Metropolitan Ohtsuka Hospital. He’d have to come up with an entirely new plan, an entirely new cover, and he was prepared to do all of this. His first blood heist had taken two weeks to plan. He knew any subsequent blood heist would take a month, maybe two, to plan. It would be riskier, and Karan was right. He hadn’t gotten away with his first heist. He’d been caught.

            But he’d gotten Shion a year of blood. And though he’d been caught, he was alive now, and so was Shion, and the government had let them get away with their identities still a secret from the public. Due to these facts, Nezumi considered his first heist a success. If he could pull it off once, he could pull it off again, but he’d leave it as a last resort.

            Nezumi had originally written off nonconsensual bleedings as an option not worth considering, but he’d begun to contemplate it as the days passed, and then the weeks passed. He’d begun counting Shion’s bags of blood, keeping track of them, making sure Shion wasn’t lying to him about how much blood he was drinking a day. Though he constantly made a fuss about it, Shion still seemed to be drinking a bag a day. His supply was slowly and steadily decreasing.

            There was the issue of who Nezumi would target in nonconsensual bleedings. How he would go about it. He could carry around syringes, stick people when they weren’t paying attention and quickly pull blood from their bodies with a fast yank of the syringe plunger, then run. This would only get him a syringe at a time. It was also extremely risky.

            He could target the homeless. Knock them out in the middle of the night and drag their unconscious bodies into deserted alleyways and draw pints of blood from them—not enough to kill them, but just as much as he would give in one of his own donations.

            Nezumi had read too about blood prostitutes—desperate people who worked as prostitutes, but if told the correct code word, would give blood for an extra price rather than their bodies. The key was in knowing who was a blood prostitute and who was a regular prostitute and who was an undercover prostitute planted to sniff out vamps and vamp sympathizers who were looking for blood prostitutes. Nezumi also couldn’t figure out what this code word was, or if it changed regularly, or if blood prostitutes were even still on the street or had vanished alongside blood suppliers after the mass panic over vamps in Tokyo had occurred due to Nezumi’s own heist.

            The last common option was murder. Instead of knocking out a homeless person, Nezumi could kill one. Drain them of their blood completely. There was an average of 1.5 gallons of blood in a grown man. That was twelve pints. Each human could feed Shion for a week and a half. It would be a lot of murder, but Nezumi had lived on Tokyo’s streets himself for a while amongst the homeless. Some of them deserved to die. Nezumi knew how to talk to people on the street—he could find out who the perverts were, the rapists and the murderers themselves. He could target those only.

            The issue, of course, was Shion. He would not drink blood from murder. He would not be happy if Nezumi murdered anyone. He would, in fact, likely throw a fit and possibly leave Nezumi. For this reason, Nezumi attempted to put murder out of his mind.

            There were other options. Definitely options outside that main five that Nezumi just hadn’t figured out yet, hadn’t found evidence for online. But he continuously searched.

            “What are you doing?” Shion murmured, and Nezumi glanced up, hardly seeing the man across the dark living room as he’d been staring at his laptop screen, which was bright, and Shion stood in darkness.

            Nezumi exited out of his vamp net screen so what showed instead on his laptop was the window he’d pulled up in case Shion came out of bed looking for him—some article he’d found on the major themes in _Les Miserables._

            “Nothing,” Nezumi said, squinting at Shion, who walked deeper into the living room until he was at the couch, which he climbed onto, nearly sitting on Nezumi so that Nezumi had to move his laptop to the edge of his lap.

            Close now and illuminated by Nezumi’s laptop screen, Shion’s blanket-clad shoulders and sleepy expression were clearly visible.

            “Go back to bed, I’ll be right there.”

            “It’s the middle of the night,” Shion murmured. He sat with his feet on the couch cushion, his legs bent and knees to his chest. He leaned against Nezumi, his warmth pressing into Nezumi’s side. “Is that Sparknotes?”

            “Just research.”

            “Since when did you research your plays? I’m sure you know more about _Les Mis_ than this Sparknote person,” Shion mumbled, his head against Nezumi’s shoulder.

            Nezumi looked down at him, saw that he had already closed his eyes.

            “Don’t fall asleep here, professor. Go back to bed, I’ll be there in a second.”

            “Nezumi, you’re going to do amazing in auditions. Unless you keep yourself up like this worrying and psyching yourself out for no reason. So go to sleep.”

            Nezumi watched Shion’s closed eyes, then quickly clicked on the history tab and cleared it while Shion couldn’t see him. He closed his laptop next, and Shion’s eyes squinted back open.

            “Okay, professor, let’s go to sleep.”

            “Are you really so worried about auditions?” Shion asked sleepily. He freed his arms from the blanket draped over him that he’d brought from the bed and wound them around Nezumi’s waist.

            “Extra research for the role can’t hurt,” Nezumi offered. He wasn’t worried about auditions. _Twelfth Night_ was still going on, of course, but the manager had announced the next play already. Auditions weren’t for months. Nezumi knew he’d get a lead. He’d mostly evened out on the meds, knew they wouldn’t affect his acting anymore. He felt normal now. Happier than normal, but that wasn’t so difficult.

            Shion was breathing more deeply now, sagging into Nezumi’s side. Nezumi shifted the laptop off his lap, pulled the blanket up from where it’d lowered from Shion’s shoulder.

            “Professor, don’t go to sleep here. Come, let’s go to bed.”

            Shion murmured something unintelligible, turning his face into Nezumi’s sleeve. It was already the end of April, and spring was arriving quickly, but the nights were still cool. Nezumi was glad for Shion’s body warmth at his side.

            “You’ll hurt your back sleeping like this,” Nezumi whispered, turning slowly so as not to disturb Shion, listening to Shion’s soft protest to this brief movement, a garbled and muffled sound.

            Nezumi eyed him. He wasn’t sure if he could carry Shion anymore. He remembered distinctly having lifted the man before, but that was when Shion had been starving.

            He wasn’t starving any longer. Nezumi refused to allow him to starve any longer again.

            Nezumi shifted more, holding Shion’s head and guiding his cheek so it rested against the couch instead of his own arm. The professor’s eyes did not open, and his objections were even less audible than before, sighs of breath more than sound.

            Nezumi took stock of Shion’s position, then slipped an arm beneath Shion’s bent knees, another around Shion’s back. He took a breath, then stood up, lifting Shion at the same time and holding Shion against his chest.

            Shion’s arms immediately wound around Nezumi’s neck. He shifted closer to Nezumi’s chest.

            “I know you’re awake, professor,” Nezumi told him. Shion was heavy but not difficult to carry even so. The blanket had slipped from Shion’s shoulders and trailed to the floor, caught between Nezumi’s arm and Shion’s back.

            “I’m not,” Shion said back, his smile half hidden by Nezumi’s t-shirt.

            Nezumi was glad Shion kept his eyes closed, allowing his own smile to go unnoticed. He carried Shion out the living room and to their bedroom, careful not to trip on the blanket, and set the man down on his side of the bed, peeling the blanket out from underneath him and covering him with it before climbing onto his own side.

            Shion outstretched an arm, caught Nezumi’s t-shirt with it, pulled him.

            “I thought you were sleeping.”

            “I’m sleep-grabbing you, it’s nearly as common as sleep-walking. It’s not a conscious decision,” Shion murmured back.

            The man was ridiculous, but Nezumi slid closer to the him anyway.

            “Are you going to sleep-kiss me goodnight?” Nezumi asked, when his face was an inch from Shion’s.

            Shion lifted his fingers from Nezumi’s shirt, his eyes still closed. Touched Nezumi’s chin, fingers fumbling, slid his touch up farther until his fingertips were on Nezumi’s lips.

            Shion leaned forward then. Pressed his lips to his own fingers, and then his fingers were gone, and his lips were on Nezumi’s, not entirely briefly.

            When Shion moved away, he didn’t go far. His lips were no longer touching Nezumi’s, but they nearly were. His nose was, and his forehead, and his hair tickled Nezumi’s own hairline. Nezumi felt every breath fall from the man’s lips. It distracted him from his own breathing until he decided to match his own breaths with Shion’s.

            Nezumi kept his eyes open for just another minute, then closed them, as Shion was too close for Nezumi to see him clearly any longer.

            Never in Nezumi’s life would he have expected himself to be in this position. Lying with his forehead touching that of a man he loved. Falling asleep in the bed they shared, in the room they shared, in the apartment they shared. Trusting this man with his life and knowing this man trusted him the same.

            Nezumi would kill for Shion. He knew this instantly and without a doubt or any degree of surprise. He would kill once and he would kill again. He’d do it however many times necessary to ensure this position he was in now – bizarre and unbelievable but somehow true – was never taken from him.

*

It happened out of the blue, which didn’t feel right. If anything, it should have crept up, Shion thought. If anything, he should have had warning.

            Instead, while he was cooking ground beef to make tacos for when Nezumi got home, while he was reaching for the salt to add to the meat, he caught sight of his own wrist. He felt that strange way of remembering his own body, of registering it, when mostly it went unnoticed, taken for granted, there but not thought about consciously.

            When he looked at his own wrist, registering it, in an instant he thought about Halloween at the bakery. In an instant he thought about Momoe’s wrists, and the chair legs in his hand, and the way he’d plunged one after the other through Momoe’s wrists, through the table underneath those wrists, pinning her down.

            He stopped reaching for the salt. He mostly forgot about the salt. He brought his wrist closer to himself, looked at it, but didn’t see it at all. Saw instead the pale of Momoe’s wrists, gouged, without blood and then slowly with blood, seeping out from between her arms and the table beneath them, seeping out also from the top of her wrists so he could see it trickling in a curve over her skin.

            He looked at his wrist and instead saw Momoe thrashing, instead heard her screams, instead felt his own hands wrapping back around the chair legs and pulling them out and insisting she was fine, but she wasn’t, there were holes in her wrists like she’d been hole-punched, like her skin and flesh and bones were just pieces of paper.

            “What’s wrong?”

            Shion jumped back, pressed his hand to his chest – his left hand, as his right had been grabbed by Nezumi, who was beside him even though he was supposed to be at a session with Safu.

            “You’re supposed to be at a session with Safu,” Shion breathed. He could barely speak. His breath had emptied from his lungs at the sound of Nezumi’s voice, suddenly there in the bakery kitchen beside himself and Momoe – except that he wasn’t in the bakery kitchen at all, he was in the kitchen of the apartment he and Nezumi owned together, lived in together, were safe in together.

            Nezumi’s voice had been panicked and this registered only secondarily. Shion stared at Nezumi, who was inspecting Shion’s wrist now, as if it might have a hole in it too.

            “I was, and then I came home,” Nezumi replied slowly, looking up from Shion’s wrist.

            “Oh,” Shion said. His heart was rampant, but he understood now what had happened. He’d just zoned out. He’d remembered Momoe’s death in an instant, in a way he hadn’t been allowed to think about it before because Nezumi had been missing and then Nezumi had been gone completely and then Nezumi had been hurting himself and then Nezumi had been in the psychiatric hospital and then Nezumi had been released but not quite himself yet, healing still, making progress, still not himself because he never would be.

            The Nezumi that was cold and secretive, guarded and easily closed-off – he was gone now. He wouldn’t be back. In odd moments, Shion found himself missing this Nezumi, this harsh and severe Nezumi, this mysterious and unknowable Nezumi, this temperamental and in-denial Nezumi. This old Nezumi was like an ex-boyfriend, almost, that Shion knew he had to give up because it hadn’t been a healthy relationship, to be with someone who couldn’t open up, to be with someone with so many secrets, who could become cold and cruel in an instant if it meant shielding himself from thinking about his past.

            The Nezumi Shion had now was making progress. He was opening up. He was honest and softer and much more vulnerable, much sadder at times, but much happier too, and he didn’t hide any of these things from Shion. It was strange, this new Nezumi. But Shion was so absurdly in love with him that he hardly missed the old Nezumi at all, just in strange moments that Shion couldn’t rationalize to himself.

            But because of all these changes with Nezumi, because of everything that had happened _after_ Halloween, Shion hadn’t been allowed to think about Halloween itself. What had happened in the bakery. The five Vamp Hunters who’d died, Momoe included. The chair legs through her wrists and the last one through the very center of her chest.

            “I said your name when I walked in. You were just staring at your wrist, I thought you’d burned yourself or something,” Nezumi said, letting go of Shion’s wrist now.

            “I can’t burn myself,” Shion said. He pressed his wrist to his chest.

            “Right. Yeah,” Nezumi agreed. He watched Shion with concern, with only concern. The old Nezumi would have watched Shion with suspicion too, but there was no suspicion now.

            Shion swallowed. He didn’t know if he could say her name. They never did.

            But he didn’t want to lie to Nezumi. He’d lied to the old Nezumi and the old Nezumi had lied to him. This Nezumi didn’t lie. This Nezumi was honest about everything. It was one of his Steps.

            “I just – I just remembered Momoe,” Shion said. His voice dropped to a whisper on her name, a noticeable, undeniable drop he almost winced at, but Nezumi didn’t seem upset by it.

            More concerned, maybe. He tilted his head. Reached up and tucked his bangs behind his ear. The gesture was so familiar Shion felt his racing heart slow, felt his shoulders relax.

            “Remembered that she exists? Existed, I mean,” Nezumi added, as if he’d forgotten for a moment she was dead. Maybe he did forget.

            “That I killed her,” Shion whispered. He hadn’t thought about it, not correctly, not with a clear mind. When he’d thought about it, it had been fleeting, in an inconsequential way. He’d murdered someone. He’d murdered several people. He hadn’t let himself think about any of them, but it was Momoe whose death mattered most. He’d tortured her first. He’d pinned her to a table with wooden chair legs. Stakes in each of her wrists.

            Nezumi reached out. Turned off the stove, which Shion had forgotten was on.

            “I was making tacos.”

            “That’s okay, come, sit down, you’re all pale,” Nezumi said, pulling Shion gently to the stools by the counter.

            “I murdered her,” Shion told him. He realized he’d never told Nezumi what happened. Not everything, not the details of it. The blood that seeped into his shoes. The bodies he’d held to shield himself while Momoe shot at him. When she ran out of bullets. When she climbed on the table and watched him without protesting. When they both knew he would kill her. When they both knew he would torture her first. The sound of her screams. The strange words about her mother.

            “It was self-defense,” Nezumi said, but only after a moment, as if he wasn’t convinced of the words. He sat on the stood he always sat on, but this time pulled it so it was right next to Shion’s, so that their knees touched as Nezumi leaned closer to him.

            “No, it wasn’t,” Shion said.

            “She’s a Vamp Hunter. Was. She was a Vamp Hunter. She came to the bakery to kill you.”

            “I wanted her dead.”

            “Shion.”

            “I wanted to kill her. I wanted to do it slowly so she would hurt. I did do it slowly. I pinned her down to a table with the legs of a chair and she screamed – ”

            Nezumi took Shion’s hands in his own. His fingers were cool, and at his touch, Shion found he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t tell Nezumi any more of it.

            “It’s okay,” Nezumi said quietly. He still looked only concerned and nothing else. Shion didn’t understand it.

            Concern wasn’t the way to treat a murderer. Concern wasn’t right.

            “You said that in one of your letters you sent me when I was in the psych ward,” Nezumi said. “About the chair legs. Safu told me she was dead in a vague way, and I knew it was you that – She told me some things, but not the details. Not the chair legs.”

            Shion turned his hands around inside of Nezumi’s so he could wrap his fingers around Nezumi’s, squeeze them, and Nezumi squeezed back.

            “You don’t have to tell me. But you can, you know. I want to know if you want to tell me.”

            Shion shook his head. He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted to not be a murderer, but he wanted Momoe to be dead, and he wanted to be the one that had done it. And he was. He was the one that had done it.

            “You can’t feel guilty for that,” Nezumi said, as if he’d read Shion’s mind, and maybe he had, he was looking at Shion carefully enough, like a mind reader might, with scrutiny alongside his concern now.

            “I can’t?” Shion asked.

            “Shion, she deserved it.”

            Shion pulled his hands free from Nezumi’s now. “I know! I know she did, I know, and if I could go back I wouldn’t change a thing, I’d do it again, but that’s not the point!”

            “What is the point?”

            “The point is I’m a murderer!”

            “You’re not a murderer.”

            Shion knew that he was. A part of him wanted Nezumi to acknowledge this. A part of him was proud of this. He’d killed a monster. Maybe he was a monster too, but wasn’t that what everyone said about vamps anyway? Didn’t Shion deserve to be a monster, after how he’d been treated his entire life? After starving and hiding and lying and living in fear?

            Nezumi lifted his hand. Cupped Shion’s cheek. “She would have killed you. It was self-defense. You were saving your own life.”

            Shion said nothing. Wanted to lean into Nezumi’s palm, accept his words as truth, but he couldn’t. Self-defense wasn’t sticking chair legs through someone’s wrists. Self-defense wasn’t trying to think of ways to torture someone before giving them the relief of death.

            “If you don’t care about saving your own life, think about me,” Nezumi said, letting his palm drop from Shion’s cheek.

            Shion blinked at him. Nezumi hadn’t even been in the bakery. He’d left with Karan and Safu out the back.

            “If you hadn’t done it first, she would have killed you. And where would I be without you?” Nezumi asked, tilting his head, looking at Shion for a moment before smiling lightly.

            A smile that Old Nezumi never had. A smile that Shion had never seen before on this man. Shy and gentle and soft enough to make Shion’s chest hurt.

            To keep this smile where it was, Shion didn’t argue. Didn’t insist again that he was a murderer – a cold-blooded, torturing murderer – that Nezumi should have acknowledged that, that Nezumi _would_ have acknowledged that, that Shion needed Nezumi to acknowledge that and forgive him for it, or better yet, be proud of him for it.

            Instead, Shion leaned forward. Was glad Nezumi had scooched his stool so close to his own, as he was able now to tuck his face into Nezumi’s neck, and Nezumi was able to wrap his arms around him, and Shion was able to breathe the man in and forget that he’d killed, that he’d been just the monster everyone insisted vamps were.

*

Shion was unhappy.

            Nezumi could see this. It started that day at the tail-end of April when Nezumi had come home to find him staring at his wrist, when Shion had spoken about Momoe – said her name aloud – for the first time since Nezumi had gotten out of the psych ward.

            Nezumi cursed himself in that moment. He’d let himself forget about Momoe. He’d let himself think that Momoe had only affected him, and he’d forgetten that Momoe had affected Shion too. Shion had been there when she’d died, had been the one to facilitate this death. Of course that would affect him, of course Shion would convince himself that he was some kind of killer now.

            But Shion was not a killer. He got upset when Nezumi swatted the stray flies that occasionally made it into their apartment. To have been the reason a person died – even a person like Momoe – it was inevitable that such a thing would make Shion think stupid thoughts.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure what to say to the man to convince Shion that he was not actually a killer. The idea of Shion as a murderer was in fact ridiculous. Sure, Momoe was dead, and Shion had a part in that, but ultimately she’d done it to herself. She was psychotic and sadistic and everything that happened to her was her own doing.

            A week passed with Shion moping, in that way he moped, which wasn’t to do it openly and instead to put on his happy face, as if Nezumi couldn’t tell the difference between his real goofy grins and his bullshit _I’m-convinced-I’m-a-murderer-and-it’s-eating-me-up-inside_ smiles. It was somewhat insulting that he was convinced he could trick Nezumi, but Nezumi let him keep up his front. Calling Shion out wouldn’t help anything.

            It was early May when Nezumi had the idea and made the order, and the end of the first week of May when the package came in the mail. Luckily, it came when Shion was at work, and Nezumi immediately stuck the contents in the washing machine on the quick-and-gentle cycle while he took a shower.

            After his shower, he transferred the package contents to the dryer, time-setting it for only ten minutes, knowing the delicate fabric would dry quickly. He stood in the bathroom while he waited for it to finish drying, looking in the mirror and trying to figure out what the hell to do with his hair. He thought the sexiest look might be a mussed sort of thing, so he rubbed his fingers haphazardly through the damp locks, trying to give it volume, a _just-had-sex_ look. He was applying mascara and still undecided on whether lipstick would be too much or the touch he needed when the drying machine let out its loud beep to alert him to the end of the cycle.

            Nezumi retrieved what he’d ordered. Tried it on and was relieved it fit – though he knew his measurements from getting fitted for costumes at the theater and had made sure to order the right size. He stood in front of the mirror again, but it only showed his chest up, and they didn’t have a full-length mirror.

            Nezumi sighed. Left the bathroom and got his phone from their bedroom, texted Shion asking when he’d be getting home. Shion was at class, and oftentimes he stopped at the bakery before coming home. It’d be useful to know if this was Shion’s plan today – Nezumi didn’t feel like lounging around in lingerie for hours if Shion wasn’t even going to come home soon. Besides, goosebumps were starting to rise on Nezumi’s arms. He went to the kitchen and put a mug of water in the microwave for tea, was watching the mug revolve when his phone lit up.

            _Almost home. Why?_

            Nezumi didn’t text back. Put a teabag into his warm mug and held it in his palms, not drinking it because it’d scorch his tongue but just letting it warm his skin, the feel of the warmth traveling up his arms.

            The tea was cool enough for Nezumi to take tentative sips of it when he heard the key in the door. He left the mug on the counter and went back to the bedroom. He should have gotten rose petals or candles or some shit, but it was too late for any of that now. He arranged himself on the bed, laying on his side with his elbow on the mattress and his head propped on his palm.

            “I’m home!” Shion called. Nezumi could hear the door click closed.

            “In the bedroom,” Nezumi called back. He’d planned to make his voice gruff and sexy but had completely forgotten, and then Shion was walking into the bedroom, not looking at him but down at his phone.

            “You never texted back,” he said to his phone, turning to the closet.

            Nezumi held back his impatient sigh and cleared his throat.

            Shion took a second, head still bent down to his phone, then turned to look over his shoulder. His hand holding his phone dropped to his side. He blinked.

            Nezumi waited for Shion’s goofy grin to spread over his face – he hadn’t seen it for so long, was sure this pink and black lacy number with garters and bows and all would do just the trick – but all Nezumi got was Shion’s mild surprise.

            “What’s going on?” Shion asked, after a moment.

            “I’m changing a lightbulb. What do you think is going on?” Nezumi snapped, then realized he shouldn’t have snapped. He pushed himself up, his elbow hurting, and scooted to the edge of the bed, crossing one leg over the other and leaning back with his palms flat on the mattress behind him. “Come closer, professor.”

            Shion did not come closer. He looked at the floor for a moment, then peeked back up at Nezumi. He sighed, and Nezumi gritted his teeth but kept his seductive smile hitched.

            “I’m kind of tired, Nezumi. It’s been a long day at work.”

            “Let me help you unwind,” Nezumi said.

            Shion rubbed the back of his neck with the hand not holding his phone. “And I’ve got some essays to grade.”

            Nezumi stood up. Walked closer to Shion, who flattened his back against the closed closet door, which Nezumi decided to pretend not to notice.

            When he was in front of Shion, he slipped his fingers between two of Shion’s shirt buttons, tucked his lips against Shion’s neck. “Come on, professor, play with me.”

            “Nezumi,” Shion said. Not quite exasperated, but close enough.

            Nezumi closed his eyes, lips still on Shion’s neck. The lingerie was for men and had this lace thing that wrapped around his chest just under his nipples, hung down with straps that connected to the thong. The whole contraption was ridiculous, and he was well aware of that. It was supposed to make Shion laugh. It was supposed to make Shion want him anyway. They’d had sex even while Shion had been in his moping phase, but it had felt routine in a way sex hadn’t with Shion before. Nezumi almost wanted to push the man away from him. He had a Frustration on the tip of his tongue that he didn’t offer Shion even though Safu told him he should – _I feel like you’re pulling away from me. It’s scaring the shit out of me. What do I have to do to make you come back?_

            “Your skin is cold, you should put on some clothes,” Shion said, his hands on Nezumi’s arms now, pushing him back gently.

            Nezumi stepped back, out of Shion’s loose grip. Wrapped his hand in his hair and wanted to yell at Shion, but yelling would just make him feel worse. Safu told Nezumi that his emotions often morphed into anger, even when it wasn’t anger he was feeling. He should try to embrace what he was really feeling, rather than letting it come out as rage, or coldness, or sullenness.

            Nezumi tried not to be enraged or cold or sullen that Shion wasn’t even looking at him in this stupid lingerie, but at some space of the floor between their feet.

            “Yeah, okay,” Nezumi said quietly. “A different day, you’re tired,” he agreed.

            Shion looked at him quickly, a dart of his eyes – brown from the contacts he hadn’t yet taken off – and nodded before walking out of the bedroom. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes into the t-shirt and sweats he always wore when he came home.

            Nezumi didn’t point this out. Shion was already gone, and Nezumi heard noises from the kitchen. Shion would probably cook him something – he was always cooking Nezumi something, worried about Nezumi’s health when it wasn’t Nezumi’s health that needed worrying about.

            Nezumi stood still in the middle of their bedroom and listened to the noises. He didn’t change out of the lingerie even though he wanted to rip it off of him. Even though all of his skin was chilled.

*

While Nezumi was at a night show, Shion searched for the lingerie he’d come home to find Nezumi wearing the night before.  

            It took ten minutes to find, balled up in the back of Nezumi’s t-shirt drawer.

            Shion pulled it out. It was a delicate and intricate lace thing, lots of snaps and strings and bows, and Shion wondered how long it had taken Nezumi to put the garment on. He imagined the man, struggling with it, cursing at it and ripping it off of him and throwing it across the room before retrieving it to try again.

            Shion balled it all up in his hands. He wanted to cry. He hated himself, and he hated Nezumi for buying this thing and struggling with it and putting it on and letting Shion reject him without saying a word.

            Nezumi should have gotten mad. Old Nezumi would have been pissed that he’d put so much work into figuring out this absurd lace contraption only to have Shion say no to him. He should have yelled, and then Shion would have had an excuse to yell back. They used to yell at each other all the time. They used to get pissed and hurt each other and lie, but now Nezumi was honest and kind and understanding and soft and gentle and good, and how on earth did Shion deserve that?

            He was a murderer, he deserved to be snapped at, he deserved the treatment Old Nezumi would have given him, pre-therapy Nezumi, Nezumi who was cold and detached and would have slit his icy eyes at Shion and snapped at him in a way that hollowed Shion out, because that was what Shion deserved. He deserved to be hollowed and carved and killed, he deserved to have wooden chair legs speared into his wrists and then his chest, he deserved to feel pain like the pain he had given, he deserved to be hurt, and all Nezumi was doing was loving him and buying lingerie for him and caring about him – how dare he? How dare he treat Shion so carefully when Shion only wanted the roughness he used to know from Nezumi, the sharp edges and the unpredictable moodiness?

            Shion shoved the lingerie back in Nezumi’s drawer and left the apartment. When he returned twenty minutes, Nezumi still wasn’t home and wouldn’t be for an hour, and Shion had a bottle of the cheapest vodka in the liquor store.

            Shion never had alcohol before. It was a human drink, and Shion suspected without fully knowing it would make him violently sick the way human foods did, likely even more so.

            Shion didn’t buy alcohol to make himself sick. He knew humans drank alcohol to forget, and Shion, too, wanted to forget the way he had forgotten before. He wanted to go back to when murdering Momoe hadn’t bothered him, hadn’t even been a thought in his head, when he’d been too preoccupied with worrying about Nezumi to even care that he himself had killed someone.

            Shion stood at the counter and poured the vodka into a mug, sniffed it, nearly threw up at the smell and the thought of drinking it. It smelled like chemicals. Shion sniffed it again, then went into the cupboard for a bag of blood. He’d already had his full bag of blood for the day, but he didn’t think about that. He tore open the bag and poured it into the mug on top of the vodka, then sniffed it again.

            It smelled piney now because of the blood, like the woods or a new car with a pine-freshener hanging off its rear mirror. Shion lifted the mug to his lips and drank it all at once, then poured more blood – half a mug – into the cup, then topped it off with more vodka. He continued this until all the blood was gone, then got another bag of blood, ripped it open with shaking hands so that some of the blood spurted on the counter and filled up his mug too much so he had to gulp down some of it before he could add vodka to it.

            He was still drinking when the door opened, but now he was slumped on a stool and there was a lot of blood on the counter and more than half the vodka bottle was gone and his head was spinning.

            The light flicked on, and only then did Shion realize he’d never turned it on himself, he’d been sitting in the dark. There were two full bags of blood next to him, and he grabbed at one, squeezing it and wondering what it would taste like mixed in his bloody cocktail.

            “What the – Shit, Shion.”

            The bag of blood was torn out of Shion’s hands, and Nezumi was in front of him, face swimming, eyeliner not fully wiped off from around his eyes – even when he played men in his shows, he wore eyeliner. It made his eyes more visible to the people in the back of the audience, Nezumi had once said. It made him stand out more, as if he needed anything to help make him stand out, as if he wasn’t the most beautiful person in the world already, and he’d dressed in lingerie just for Shion, and Shion had turned him down – who in their right mind would turn a man like this down?

            Shion wasn’t in his right mind. He knew this well. He was a murderer, and murderers were never in their right minds. They were psychopaths. They were insane. They never made the right decisions, and they always made the wrong ones.

            Nezumi’s hands were on Shion’s face, holding him up. “What did you do?” Nezumi asked, face close, swimming, swimming, so Shion couldn’t focus on any of his beautiful beautiful beautiful features but that dark eyeliner wrapped around his beautiful eyes.

            “I killed someone,” Shion replied, once he could manage to fit his voice out of his thick throat. He felt sick. Worse than sick. Not the kind of sick that came with eating human food, but an entirely different kind of sick, a terrible sick, the worst kind of sick there ever was, the kind of sick only murderers were allowed to feel.

            “Shion,” Nezumi whispered, but even then, he didn’t sound mad. He sounded only sad, and he let go of Shion’s face, and he walked away from Shion, and then he was back and he had paper towels and he was mopping up the blood on the counter. Shion’s food, that was his food, that was all that was keeping Shion alive, and Nezumi was getting rid of it.

            Good. Let the man get rid of it. Let Shion starve again. He deserved to starve. He deserved to wither and suffer and die.

            The paper towels were on Shion’s mouth next, and he protested, jerked back, but Nezumi’s hand was on the back of his head.

            “Shh, it’s okay, you’ve got blood all over you, it’s freaking me out a bit, let me just clean you up a little,” Nezumi said gently.

            Shion watched him. Wanted to tell Nezumi that he felt sick, but that would require opening his mouth, and that didn’t seem like a good idea, in fact it felt like the worst idea he’d ever had, so Shion clamped his jaw shut, closing it off from the bile rising up his throat.

            “How many bags did you drink, professor?” Nezumi asked, still not sounding mad, back to wiping the counter, moving fast, which didn’t help Shion’s dizziness.

            Shion moaned with his mouth closed so it came out a weird hum.

            Nezumi had picked up the vodka bottle now. There was blood all over the glass of it. Nezumi was closing it. Put the closed bottle in the sink, which was a weird place for it, but Shion said nothing because he couldn’t open his mouth, or blood would come streaming out, and Nezumi had only just cleaned up the counter so nicely.

            Nezumi finished cleaning and was back again, standing in front of Shion.

            “It’s okay,” he said, even though it wasn’t. Shion had wasted blood. He’d scared Nezumi because he knew he was covered in blood still, felt it seeping in his sleeves and crusting on the edges of his face. He’d killed someone, and that wasn’t okay either.

            Shion shook his head.

            “Let me give you a shower,” Nezumi said. He was holding Shion’s hand. He was so damn nice.

            “Fuck you,” Shion said, accidentally opening his mouth, but nothing came out except his voice.

            Nezumi just looked at him. Shion couldn’t figure out his expression because he was drunk. He could barely think coherently about anything except for Momoe, and the chair legs in her wrists, and her screams, and the way she’d writhed on the table, stuck there, tortured.

            Shion wished he’d tortured her longer. Shion wished he’d never hurt her at all. Shion wished she was still alive so he could murder her again, harder this time, and wondered if that was a thing, murdering someone harder. Had he murdered her too easily? Was that why he felt empty inside?

            No, he wasn’t empty. There was something writhing in him. That wasn’t emptiness. He felt filled with poison. Maybe he was being murdered. He deserved that, he deserved that.

            “Come on, professor. You’ll feel better when you’re in bed,” Nezumi said, softly. He was so soft. All soft. He never used to be soft. He’d gotten soft, but he never used to be.

            Shion pushed the man away from him. This soft man, unfamiliar and lovely and Shion loved him, he did, he did, and he knew this soft man loved him back, but what the hell was Shion supposed to do with love?

            He wanted hate. He needed hate. He needed Old Nezumi, who would hate him because Old Nezumi hated evil people, Old Nezumi was not forgiving, Old Nezumi was cruel to those who deserved cruelty, and who deserved cruelty more than a murderer? Who deserved cruelty more than Shion?

            “I don’t want you,” Shion told him, this soft Nezumi who looked at him even more softly.

            “That’s okay, professor, let’s just go to bed.”

            “I don’t want you!” Shion shouted, when Nezumi tried to coax him off the stool again. He gripped the sides of the counter, so he wouldn’t be moved. “I want Old Nezumi! I want Old Nezumi!”

            Nezumi stopped pulling him. Shion thought he would fall over. He gripped the counter more tightly. He wished he still had his homemade cocktail in front of him. He wished the counter was still covered in blood and he could press his lips to it and drink it off just like that, like an animal because that was what he was.

            He wasn’t human. He was a monster and he was a vamp and he was a murderer, and they were all the same, and Old Nezumi had known that, Old Nezumi hadn’t trusted him, Old Nezumi had lost his family to murderers and had hated vamps for that.

            “Old Nezumi,” Nezumi repeated, after a moment. His voice sounded hollow, just like Shion’s heart was.

            It had to be hollow, Shion’s heart. It couldn’t be filled with blood because Shion didn’t have blood.

            “You used to be different,” Shion reminded Nezumi, hearing the slur of his own voice and pushing past it, trying his hardest to make himself understood. “You used to be nothing like this.”

            Nezumi’s eyes were wide. Ringed in eyeliner. He was beautiful and he was hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Shion saw this, recognized this. Nezumi was hurt, and Shion had done this to him – good. Now Nezumi would understand. Shion was not a good guy. Shion was capable of hurting. Shion was so good at hurting.

            “You used to – ” Shion couldn’t remember what else he wanted to say. He didn’t have to remember. Nezumi was nodding, still swimming, and nodding now too.

            “I know,” he said quietly. He sounded sad. Good, that meant he knew Shion was a monster, that meant he understood. “Come to bed, Shion.”

            “Yell at me!” Shion shouted at him. He wanted to cry. He wanted to throw up.

            Nezumi looked like he wanted to cry, too. Like he wanted to throw up, too. Like a mirror, a mirror of Shion except that he wasn’t, he was human and Shion was not.

            Shion opened his mouth, to tell Nezumi what, he didn’t know, but all he did was vomit, blood pouring out from his lips, onto his lap and the counter and Nezumi, who didn’t step back, and Shion didn’t turn away. He kept vomiting, and Nezumi came closer, his hands on Shion. Shion closed his eyes and they were wet, his throat hurt and so did his stomach, and Shion hoped beyond all else that this was what it felt like to die, that he would be dead soon, because that was what he deserved.

*

Nezumi wanted to sleep on the couch, but he had to be with Shion in case Shion got sick again during the night. But before returning to Shion’s side, Nezumi cleaned the kitchen with bleach and rinsed their blood-covered clothes in the bathtub before throwing them all in the washing machine, hoping the blood wouldn’t stain. He scrubbed at the carpet of the living room next, where some of Shion’s vomit had spread to, and inspected the cabinets and counter of the kitchen to make sure he’d gotten every speck of blood.

            It took over an hour and a half to clean everywhere, checking on Shion every few minutes by sticking his head in the bedroom doorway to make sure Shion was still asleep, and then Nezumi showered himself a second time before he dressed again and got into bed.

            He’d already cleaned Shion, while Shion was hardly conscious, so the man no longer smelled like blood or vodka, the overwhelming smells of which had flooded Nezumi since he opened the apartment door after his show to find Shion slumped over the couch covered in these liquids.

            Beside Shion in bed, even though he was exhausted, Nezumi didn’t fall asleep. He looked at Shion’s back, rising and falling slowly. He thought about Shion’s slurred words and wished they had been more slurred so he wouldn’t have understood them, but the problem was he understood them too well.

            _I don’t want you. I want Old Nezumi._

            Nezumi knew he was different. He knew it was a good thing, in some respects, because he was getting healthier, not his body but the thoughts inside his head. Momoe had changed him, and therapy had changed him, and the anti-depressants he took changed him too. He was not the man whom Shion had met a year and a half before. He was different, and that was a good thing, he knew that.

            But he was not who Shion had fallen in love with. Nezumi had had these worries before, constantly, had talked to Safu about them, and she’d told him to talk to Shion about them, but Nezumi hadn’t been able to do that yet. He’d wanted to. He’d planned to. But now, clearly, he didn’t need to.

            Shion told him out right. Nezumi wasn’t who Shion wanted anymore.

            Nezumi rolled over onto his back, stared at the ceiling. He thought they were happy. Before Shion started thinking about Momoe again, Nezumi thought they were really happy. Shion had talked about marriage, hadn’t he? He’d said those insane things about rings. He’d said those insane things about wanting to call Nezumi his husband.

            Had he meant _Old Nezumi_ when he’d talked about marriage? Is that who Shion wanted to share rings with? Not Nezumi himself, as he was now, different than who he’d been before?

            Nezumi got out of bed without realizing what he was doing. He was in the kitchen before he made the conscious decision to walk there, and it smelled strongly like bleach. Nezumi opened a cupboard. Took out his bottle of anti-depressants. He’d just gotten a refill, so it was filled. The pills clattered together when Nezumi shook the bottle. He could flush them. He could stop therapy. He could turn back into the man Shion wanted.

            Nezumi tightened his hand around the bottle, then placed it carefully back into the cupboard. Returned to the bedroom, unplugged his phone from its charger, left the bedroom, considered leaving the apartment altogether, but he wanted to be able to hear if Shion woke up and was sick again. He ended up calling Safu from the living room and pressed the phone to his ear, listened to it ring before remembering it was the middle of the night.

            He had taken the phone from his ear to look at the time on it – past two in the morning – when Safu picked up, and Nezumi heard her voice, indistinct, coming out of it. He put the phone back to his ear.

            “Are you okay?” she was asking.

            “Sorry to call you so late, I didn’t realize,” Nezumi said. Now that he had her on the phone, he had no idea what to say to her.

            “That’s okay. What’s going on?” Her voice was soft from sleep.

            “Nothing,” Nezumi said. He leaned against the wall. Looked across the dark living room into the kitchen, which was empty now, but it’d been covered in blood just a few hours before. “What would happen if I went off the anti-depressants?” 

            “They’re working for you. Right? Are you having side effects? Are you feeling depressed?”

            “No.”

            There was a pause. Then, “Why do you want to go off your anti-depressants, Nezumi?”

            Nezumi closed his eyes. Tilted his head back against the living room wall. Looked at the darkness of his closed eyelids. “I’m different because of them. Because of all of this shit.”

            “That’s a good thing. You’re happy now. That’s what you’ve been telling me. Unless that’s not true?”

            Nezumi opened his eyes. “Does Shion talk to you?”

            “Of course. About what?”

            “He’s been…unhappy.”

            Safu was silent for a while. Nezumi didn’t interrupt the silence. He knew she was thinking. He felt like he was in her office, sitting across from her, watching her and waiting for her reply.

            And then she did reply. “When I talked to him the other day, I could see that, too. His unhappiness. But that’s because of Momoe and his feelings of guilt. It’s not because of you, Nezumi.”

            “Maybe it is.”

            “It’s not.”

            Nezumi sighed. “I should go, it’s late. Sorry to call.”

            “Nezumi, don’t hang up on me. Why do you think he’s unhappy with you? He’s irrationally in love with you.”

            “He used to be.”

            “His mood right now has nothing to do with you. You’re doing really well, so he doesn’t have to worry about you anymore, and he’s finally able to acknowledge what happened with Momoe, he finally has the mental ability to process it. You know him, he’s not someone who can take a life and just rationalize it as the right thing to do, even when it clearly was.”

            Nezumi said nothing. He knew all of this.

            “When you were going through the process of acknowledging and healing from your own trauma, those self-hurting feelings you had had nothing to do with Shion, right? You still loved him, even when you couldn’t stop hurting yourself, even when continuing to hurt yourself prevented you from getting to see him. He had a lot of self-doubt when you were in the psychiatric hospital, you know. A part of him thought if you loved him enough, you’d get better faster for him, but that has nothing to do with it, and you know that. He loves you. He’s just going through something right now, and even if it feels like he’s taking it out on you, he’s not. You need to give him the space and support and understanding to heal just like he did for you.”

            Nezumi felt himself relaxing against the wall. He nodded at the phone, then spoke, remembering he wasn’t in front of Safu. “Yeah, okay.”

            “You’re not just saying ‘yeah, okay,’ right?”

            “No, you’re right, you’re right. He said some shit, and I just – But you’re right.”

            “I’m glad you called me, Nezumi.”

            Nezumi was relieved he’d called her too. He wasn’t sure what the line was, with Safu being his therapist and friend. These identities of hers blurred now. He didn’t mind this, really.

            “Can I go to bed now?” Safu asked, and Nezumi laughed.

            “Yeah.”

            “Is Shion okay?”

            “He’s fine. Got drunk and went through five bags of blood, but he’s fine.”

            “Five bags of blood?” Safu asked. “He got drunk?”

            “Look, if he wakes up and doesn’t remember about the blood, don’t mention it to him. I don’t want him feeling guilty about it. He shouldn’t have to feel guilty for overeating. Humans get to be wasteful all the time, he deserves that too.”

            “Maybe he deserves it, but that’s nearly a week of his life he just downed in a night,” Safu said.

            Nezumi didn’t want to think about this, about Shion’s dwindling blood supply, about the fact that Nezumi hadn’t thought of a solution for it yet. “Go to bed, Safu, I’m hanging up now,” he said back, and he hung up before she could say anything.

            He stood still for a moment, then shrugged off the wall, returned to the bedroom and plugged his phone into his charger before getting into bed beside Shion again.

            He slid closer to the man, pressed his palm to the space between Shion’s shoulder blades, then let his hand drop to the mattress and closed his eyes.

            He wanted it to be morning, the moment when Shion would wake. He missed the man, somehow, even though Shion was lying beside him. Nezumi missed him anyway.

*


End file.
